Attunement as a practice of encountering dementia time in long-term eldercare work
Bibliographic Data
Discussing time and temporality in care work is becoming more central as societies with growing proportions of older persons with care needs strive to arrange cost-effective eldercare. As resources become scarcer, the efficiency of care work is emphasised, and care is increasingly sorted into cost-per-minute units. In our paper, we will analyse the different ways care professionals themselves describe their temporal experiences and practices concerning care interactions in long-term dementia care. Our data consists of semi-structured interviews with care professionals ( n = 25) working in round-the-clock service housing in Finland. Using thematic content analysis to analyse the data, we show that, along with a holistic understanding of temporality, good dementia care necessitates understanding alterity, which is insufficiently regarded in linear or quantitative understandings of time. By using concepts of temporal duration (Bergson), crip time (Kafer) and dementia time (Yoshizaki-Gibbons), it is possible to understand another person's alter-temporal experience, into which care can aim to enter and towards which it can attune itself. We argue that a concept of attunement is needed to fully make sense of the ideal temporal practices of dementia care. Our analysis presents attunement as understanding dementia time, receptive practices, and expressive practices, and describes limitations of attunement as temporal discordance
Attunement · Dementia · Epistemology · Qualitative research · Social science · Sociology · Temporality · Thematic analysis · Dementia and Cognitive Impairment Research · Geriatric Care and Nursing Homes · Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Caregiving · Medicine · Nursing · Psychology
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Towards an empirical ethics in care
Time and Free Will
The Rationality of Caring
Care in Practice
Psychophysical burden and lack of support
Revisioning aging
Beyond Being on Call
Electronic Health Records reshaping the socio-technical practices in Long-Term Care of older persons
Dementia and the Limits to Life
Living on a knife's edge
After Crip, Crip Afters
The Tensions between Process Time and Clock Time in Care-Work
The Condition of Postmodernity
Timewatch
Collected Papers
Conceptualising body work in health and social care
Innovation and evaluation
Taking time
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| Highly cited | No |