Abstract

In the Netherlands, individual nursing homes, as well as national policies, have expressed the aspiration to make the nursing home more homely. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we discuss in this chapter, three ways in which home and institution emerge in the space of a nursing home. First, we illustrate how access, autonomy, and control over space are negotiated. Second, we show how objects associated with the home or the institution are made differentially visible and invisible. Third, we turn to everyday routines to show the attempts to align rhythms of familiarity and rhythms of efficiency. These attempts at home-making demonstrate that the institutional character of the nursing home cannot be made invisible altogether: it remains a site with its own logic, where the integration of spheres within its walls requires ongoing reflection, debates, and efforts. Home is constantly in flux, and it is hard work to relate the public to the private.

Details publicatie

2020  Lemos Dekker, Natashe and Pols, Jeannette. Aspirations of home-making in the nursing home. In  Ways of Home Making in Care for Later Life, edited by Bernike Pasveer, Oddgeir Synnes and Ingunn Moser. Palgrave Macmillan.