The ethnographer, the research participants, and the meaningful others: Gray zones of relationality and the ethics of dementia care research.

The debate on the ethics of dementia research has tended to treat individuals with dementia, primary caregivers other family members and local communities as preestablished and distinct categories of research participants. What has been overlooked are the meaningful social relationships that run through these categories and how these relationships affect the ethnographer's positionality during and after fieldwork. In this paper, drawing on two cases of ethnographic research on family dementia care in North Italy, we propose two heuristic devices, "meaningful others" and "gray zones", which highlight the ambiguous positionality of ethnographers in care relations and local moral worlds.