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- Convenors:
-
Jared Epp
(University of Alberta)
Yvonne Wallace (University of Toronto)
Christine Verbruggen (KU Leuven)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
We invite critical reflections on the possibility of doing ethnography with uncertain or ambiguous sites and subjects of aging. We hope to challenge normative spaces of ethnography and the relationship between the where and who of research and the knowledge that emerges in hyper visible spaces.
Long Abstract
Dementia is in the long-term care home. It is on the 3rd floor behind locked doors. Somewhere else the doors are unlocked and because programming is for anyone, there’s no dementia. But dementia does not start in a care home or with a diagnosis, nor does aging start at a demographic threshold. Experiences and identities emerge through the vagaries of daily life. But in the ambiguous space of daily life, beyond specific infrastructures and diagnosed, or defined demographics, the ethnographer rarely treads. It seems that potential participants have not yet made themselves visible to the ethnographic gaze. Here, the certainty of an enclosed or disclosed subject position remains absent. Why is it that most research on dementia takes place in a long-term care home? Is it that it’s an easier place to find people? And what is the relationship between the straightforward visibility of participants and the knowledge these encounters produce?
We invite ethnographers to think about the possibilities of entering the field in the openness of daily life in the (un)enclosure of the public, or the (un)disclosure outside the diagnostic visibility of dementia. How do we create field relations and imagine and perform our research selves otherwise, beyond defined field sites and subjects? What are the challenges of gate-kept and administrated doorways? What are the possibilities for ethnographies of aging that don’t centralize a predefined way and place of becoming.
We hope to critically explore beyond a visible polarization of experience that precludes fieldwork. A specific diagnosis or not, a specific place or not. What if we think beyond these poles of site and experience to cultivate research relations amidst the ‘not-quite-sure’ of aging or memory loss. Who becomes an ethnographic subject and what’s possible when we centre not-yet visible encounters, beyond the polarity of one way or another.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper describes ethnographic and ethical uncertainties I faced as my participants were displaced from their retirement residence. By not asking and not acting, I resisted allowing my research become an opportunistic disaster ethnography nor an overtly activist one. Was this the right decision?
Paper long abstract
This paper describes the ethnographic and ethical uncertainties I faced during fieldwork with residents being displaced from a for-profit retirement residence in Edmonton, Canada. I had not intended to study the last days of life in this institution, but as my fieldsite shifted I had to reconsider my research position: what was my role and responsibility to my research and to my participants when the field was falling apart?
“Who will fight for us?” Should I have advocated for them? I wanted to ask questions of management, about what was happening and why, but I had to balance transparency of ethical research with not being too conspicuous that I would be denied access. I chose not to become a vocal advocate, but to bear witness and help residents navigate the changes, which required not asking certain questions of those in power.
"Is our suffering interesting to you?" Witnessing the closing of a retirement home in real time provided a novel ethnographic opportunity when displacement is often studied after the fact. Yet while the situation offered a rich ethnography, I resisted allowing the misfortune of residents and staff to become the focus of my enquiry.
As the field changed, I held back during moments of possible disclosure and resisted shifting to an opportunistic disaster ethnography nor an overtly activist one. Was this the right decision? Part confessional, I share my research experience within a shifting fieldsite and ask how we are to navigate ethical parameters of knowing and acting.
Paper short abstract
This paper introduces "signifying others"—how significant others become agents of observation during moments of forgetfulness. Drawing on Goffman and the medical gaze, I examine how individuals fearing memory loss orchestrate the intensified scrutiny they face from others during mishaps.
Paper long abstract
In this paper, I introduce the concept of "signifying others" to examine how significant others become agents of observation when gazing upon moments of forgetfulness. Drawing on Goffman's dramaturgical approach, I focus on how my interlocutors, while fearing impending memory loss, navigate the intense scrutiny of those around them—particularly the suspicion that they may be experiencing memory loss. Drawing on anthropological discourse on the gaze and its multifaceted role (medical and otherwise), I outline the dynamics of these gazes, especially how moments of forgetfulness become subject to others' observation. This creates an "anticipatory space" between the fear and self-suspicion of memory loss on one side and the societal, medical, and political pressures of dementia on the other. I explore the nature of the gaze in these moments—whether it is the individual noticing the gaze and negotiating it in relation to their aging and memory loss, or actively resisting the conclusions others draw. I examine how individuals respond to the gaze, balancing their self-perception with external expectations, and consider the affective impact this dynamic has on their experience of forgetfulness and aging.
Paper short abstract
The paper explores how ethnographic knowledge of aging and care is shaped when fieldwork unfolds across sites and actors. Focusing on long-term elderly care in Warsaw, the project follows care trajectories that move between households, formal institutions, and training spaces for caregivers.
Paper long abstract
The paper explores how ethnographic knowledge of aging and care is shaped when fieldwork unfolds across sites and actors. Focusing on long-term elderly care in Warsaw, the project follows care trajectories that move between households, formal institutions, and training spaces for caregivers.
In Poland, long-term care is often narrowly defined through public programmes and regulated facilities, while much of everyday care depends on informal family work and precarious, often undocumented employment. Drawing on practice-oriented studies of care (Mol 2008; Mol et al. 2010; Nilsson, Prakash, and Vink 2022), I conceptualize the long-term elderly care system as an assemblage of practices, relations, and infrastructures that sustain older adults in daily life.
Methodologically, the study employs a multi-sited and enactive ethnography (Wacquant 2015). I take part in a post-secondary medical caregiver course, plan to be employed in a range of care settings - including a public residential facility, a private care home, and home-based care services - and conduct longitudinal observations in fifteen households providing care to people aged 80 and above.
The paper engages with the panel’s theme by asking how participatory and enactive approaches to fieldwork, combined with longitudinal multi-sited observation, shape the anthropological knowledge produced. It also offers initial reflections from participating as an ethnographer in a caregiver training course.
Paper short abstract
This paper reflects on strategies to locate and build fieldwork relationships for an ethnography of dementia in everyday life outside of long term care. I explore how the openness of daily life and the vulnerabilities of dementia challenge non- institutionalized dementia as an ethnographic subject.
Paper long abstract
Dementia as an ethnographic subject has primarily been explored in the institutional context of long term care. Arguably, in this enclosed context people become more accessible interlocutors despite the communicative and cognitive challenges they face and the ethnographer must respond to. Yet living with dementia does not start here. It emerges in everyday life and its response generates different relationships, routines, ways of becoming and care practices. In general these new ways of attending to dementia create sites of gatekeeping that diminish public life, whether this is a care partner managing their loved one's interactions or community spaces navigating risk and vulnerability. As a postdoctoral fellow, hired to do ethnography in the health sciences for a specific project around dementia care pathways in urban and rural Canada and managing daily living has presented an assemblage of unforeseen challenges. How does an ethnographer create fieldwork in which the parameters are as broad as a city's aging population and as private and sequestered as lived experience at home impacted by dementia.
Through specific examples about how I'm carrying out my fieldwork and working to build relationships, I address critical questions of accessibility, rapport and ethics at the heart of any ethnographic practice as one enters the field. Along the way I situate this discussion around ideas of subject formation, knowledge production and mobilization in both concert and contrast to anthropologies of dementia in long term care to ask how else and where else ethnography can engage with the worlds of dementia.
Paper short abstract
This paper contrasts ethnography within care homes and technology-enabled care services with artists' speculations of care futures. By juxtaposing everyday realities against creative reimaginings, I unsettle assumptions about 'care crises' with possible visions for more 'careful' ageing societies.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines England's social care system through two contrasting approaches: ethnographic research and artistic speculation. Despite decades of campaigning declaring "care is in crisis," England's adult social care system remains undervalued and understaffed, demanding new perspectives in the face of political inaction.
The ethnographic approach explored mundane caring realities across three settings: care homes, technology companies' offices and call centres, and public spaces where charities support older people and kin-based carers. These sites represent distinct publics within the care sector—people receiving care, people providing care, and digital technology developers hoping to mediate these connections—revealing everyday challenges of delivering ‘good’ care amid systemic constraints.
The creative component invited illustrators and a writer to reimagine care futures using ethnographic case studies as inspiration. Rather than working within current system limitations, these artists speculated freely based on their own aspirations and fears of support in later life.
Juxtaposing these materials—grounded ethnographic present versus imaginative futures, embodied realities versus speculative possibilities—creates productive tension. This dialogue between interlocutors' lived experiences and collaborators' visions illuminates what a more "careful" aging society could become in England.
I challenge conventional care reform discussions by combining immediate caring challenges with liberated thinking about alternatives. By placing everyday care experiences alongside creative reimaginings, the paper unsettles polarising assumptions about inevitable ‘care crises’, suggesting pathways toward preferred care futures that transcend current political and systemic enclosures. This dual approach offers fresh perspectives for envisioning how care can look, feel, and be imagined otherwise.