‘This is your home now!’: conceptualizing location and dislocation in a dementia unit

Abstract

In this chapter, I discuss ethnographic work in a residential unit for Alzheimer’s patients located in the southeastern part of the United States. The borders of home and work in this nursing home are analyzed in order to unpack meanings of ‘home’ for residents. Postmodern discussions of location and dislocation for contemporary identities have relevance for an analysis of this setting. The concepts of non-place ( non-lieu) from the work of Marc Augé and of location ( lieu) from the work of Pierre Bourdieu are employed in the analysis. In this unit, well-to-do white residents are cared for by working-class black women. Intersections of race and class, as well as gender and age, form an important context for social relationships within this space. The case of one resident who daily asked for her car so that she could go home is used to illustrate the social and spatial arrangements in this setting and the ‘location’ of both patients and staff.

Creative and Opportunistic Use of Everyday Music Technologies in a Dementia Care Unit

“…The importance of music for people with dementia has often been noted [6,5], and engagement with music can be something which is intensely personal, evocative of one's own past and yet by another turn, playful and social. These observations of everyday creativities point to the potential inherent even in existing technologies (such as television) to become an active, immersive and creative technology in the setting of a dementia ward, as well as describing the kinds of enriching interactions that can arise from their use.…”

Location or dis-location? Towards a conceptualization of people and place in the care-giving experience

“…While much care for those with dementia is now delivered within the homespace, the degenerative nature of the illness leads to a decline in the health and mental well-being of the individual over time, leading (almost inevitably) to a re-location of the site of care from the home-space to some form of institutional setting such as the specialized residential nursing home. Reed-Danahay (2001) maintains that the Alzheimer's sufferer, in contemporary EuroAmerican society, can be viewed through the metaphor of displacement-the person who lacks memory and a coherent self-narrative, and who thereby also lacks a proper 'home'. This concept reflects a fairly long-standing geographical concern with the changing meanings of home and self in contemporary society (see e.g.…”

Re-imagining institutional spaces: the communitizing potential of leisure

“…Foucault (1975) mused that the purpose of institutions, specifically correctional institutions, was to segregate and supervise society's most volatile groups, making them both politically and socially harmless. In a similar vein, institutional living for older adults was developed as a way to separate those persons with severe physical or mental incapacities and who therefore occupied a devalued position from the rest of society (Reed-Danahay, 2001). As Hazan (2002) wrote, these types of institutions absolve external agents from being accountable to symbolic others whose representational codes are nebulous, unknown, or threatening.…”