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Paper short abstract

"Work in Progress" is an interactive exhibition based on ethnographic fieldwork in Swedish home care services. As an epistemic device, it explores care as continually done, undone, and redone under temporal, bodily, and organizational pressure—inviting sensory, situated inquiry.

Paper long abstract

This presentation introduces an interactive exhibition—Work in Progress (Arbete pågår)—currently being developed within an ethnographic research project on home care services in Sweden. Rather than communicating research findings about care, the exhibition aims to create spaces to explore care as continuously done, undone, and redone—under bodily strain, temporal constraints, and organizational pressures. Building on insights from ethnographic fieldwork, it is designed to pose questions about care through situated encounters rather than verbal inquiry.

Using drawings, interface screenshots from digital planning systems, fieldwork objects, and performative interventions, the exhibition will invite visitors to navigate care—from scheduling software to compression stockings—and to sense how time, bodies, smells, and responsibilities are partitioned and coordinated. “Home care” promises to move care into places we already inhabit and know. In practice, the home becomes an ongoing accomplishment that shifts and mutates as bodies age or become ill. Care appears here as sustaining and adapting rather than resolving; it can create, uphold, and postpone, but it cannot ultimately succeed.

Situated within STS and care studies, the installations function as epistemic devices that foreground the unfinished, the uncategorizable, and what falls between institutional categories. In the presentation, I reflect on exhibition-making as a research practice that reworks ethnographic material into spatial, sensory, and participatory formats, extending inquiry beyond what conventional academic writing tends to make explicit. Engagement becomes a method of inquiry, allowing tensions, contradictions, and fragilities in home care to be felt, teased out, and worked with rather than summarized.