Bev Said “No”: Learning From Nursing Home Residents About Care Politics in Our Aging Society

Abstract

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. Exposed to constant demands to care for others, residents’ stories highlight the importance of expanding cultural narratives to embrace embodied differences or care needs, to help people to talk about their own needs or limits, and to organize care as a shared, collective responsibility.