Gerontologist
December 2023
How do nursing home residents decide when, whether, or how to respond to their own and others' care needs when the need to do is constant? What can we learn from them about care politics in our aging society? Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in three long-term residential care homes in Ontario Canada, this article weaves approaches from the arts, humanities, and interpretive sociology to respond to these questions. Contextualizing nursing home residents' stories of care within broader sociocultural and political contexts, I consider how they develop critical and creative insights, not only about direct care or nursing home life but about moral, philosophical, and culturally significant questions relevant to care provision. As political actors engaged in a "politics of responsibility," they put work into navigating, negotiating, and making sense of their own and others' care needs in under-resourced contexts and in relation to circulating narratives about care, aging, and disability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSeeking to support graduate students in engaging in feminist sociological research, we provide guidance on "working the project"-working collaboratively and creatively to foster compassion and solidarity as we bring diverse research projects to fruition. We offer reflections on our everyday experiences and struggles as emerging feminist researchers, including with writing research proposals. We also include four condensed research proposals - on the social organization of care work, sex work, criminal justice, and abortion care - to support fellow students in the process.
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