Freeman, Emily 
ORCID: 0000-0001-9396-1350
(2024)
Making sense of new ageing trajectories among Black South African care home residents.
In: British Society of Gerontology 53rd Annual Conference: New Directions in Ageing and the Life Course, 2024-07-03 - 2024-07-05, University of Newcastle + Online, United Kingdom, GBR.
Abstract
In South Africa’s unique long term care regime, well-developed, high-cost private care services, an under-funded and decreasingly-state subsidised public care sector (Moore and Kelly, 2023) and a means tested Old Person’s Grant that is among the most generous tax-funded welfare payment of any middle- or low-income country, sit alongside a policy architecture that positions the family rather than the state as the primary site of support and care for older adults. Family care and interdependence, especially for the majority Black population, remains the norm. Residential care for older adults does not accord with this norm. However, cracks in the orthodoxy are becoming apparent. There are indications that younger and older adults may be increasingly willing to consider residential care not only for White older adults and kinless indigents, but for Black older adults unable or reluctant to depend on (or provide) family care. In this context, residential care can be understood as an “age inscription”: an alternative to the normative practice that is fragmented, emergent, and key to understanding social change (Coe and Alber, 2018). This paper considers how, and to what extent, Black older adults already living in residential care facilities make sense of their care arrangements in the context of the orthodoxy of family care. Interviews with 14 residents of two urban care homes present a hesitant, disjointed, and contradictory discourse about residential care. Both the care home and its residents are presented as occupying a liminal conceptual space. The lens of age inscription encourages juxtaposition of older adults as agents and recipients of social change, and reflection on its fuzzy and uneven process.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Official URL: | https://www.britishgerontology.org/events-and-cour... |
| Divisions: | Personal Social Services Research Unit |
| Subjects: | R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races |
| Date Deposited: | 18 Jul 2024 09:24 |
| Last Modified: | 18 Jul 2024 15:27 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/124280 |
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