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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

While I share the panel's call to research ageing and dementia beyond institutions and diagnostic labels, I would like to nuance it by pointing to certain distinctive strengths of institutional ethnography: the development of embodied knowledge, the sharing of material conditions with the people in the ethnographic field, and access to the explicit negotiation of social norms (Diamond 1992). I ask how these same qualities can be preserved once ethnographers move to home-based care, where the field is dispersed across hundreds of private, disconnected settings, delivered by heterogeneous actors under heterogeneous logics.

I review recent studies that offer different methodological and theoretical answers to this question, examining how each study design constructs the field of home-based care. At the same time, I propose a four-part ethnographic design for my PhD project that treats home-based care as a relational field in Matthew Desmond's (2014) sense and draws on participatory methods to align both the research agenda and its methods with the knowledge of experts by experience. The paper also outlines the new ethical challenges that arise in home care fieldwork and offers initial reflections from my own participation, as an ethnographer, in a caregiver training course.