Philip Y. Kao PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

with her Monday through Friday” In other contexts, caregiving can be operationalized
to assert a type of labour identification and experience. Caregivers often say to
themselves that, “Not everyone can be a caregiver. It takes passion; you have to like
taking care of people. Not everyone is cut out that way.” In that same conversation,
another caregiver said, “It is an impossible job. Doing everything is still not enough!” In
caregiving, the emotional dimension is far more complex than the sheer physical task of
transferring someone out of bed, brushing their teeth, and getting them to various
appointments while making sure that they are ‘toileted’ every two hours. In fact,
caregivers themselves have developed a form of dependency as well. I overheard
several times that, “If it wasn’t for my residents, I would have quit a long time ago.”
There is a creeping suspicion (on my part) that caregivers need their residents just as
much as the residents need them.
The caregiving industry can be analysed as a set of structural relationships, developing
out of a wider social, economic, and historical context. Traditional nursing homes are
being replaced by the sprawl of assisted living communities, Continuing Care
Retirement Communities and other long-term care facilities. Carder and McLean have
turned their attention to new spaces such as the world of assisted living facilities and
the Green House Project—which is a spatial concept spawned from the Eden Alternative
for designing more personal and homier nursing homes (Carder 2003, McLean 2006).
For one thing, Continuing Care Retirement Communities incorporate many services and
long-term care facilities and services in one location. The resident who transitions from
an independent condominium to a unit which has more surveillance and nursing staff
provides an interesting segue to explore how spatial organizations reinforce and
reproduce practices, perceptions and relations of independence and dependence. The
sterile nursing homes of the past will have nothing to do with the changing attitudes of
the baby-boomers. They have witnessed the institutionalisation of their parents, and
they will no doubt advocate for spaces of dignified living, new criteria for care, and new
incarnations of home and kinship. For the formal caregivers, who comprise of a diverse
work force, including pre-med and nursing students, and recent immigrants, the
burdens on and expectations of them are immense. One of the underlying challenges
remains: how much can we know about ageing, dementia and impairment if we do not
actually experience these life transformations ourselves? It is this epistemological
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