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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.