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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

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.