Interestingly,
the class on the meaning of home was thought- provoking, as I never taught
about the meaning of home. Therefore, until we were ask to write what home mean
for us I never reflected on it. Growing up in a nuclear family were my mum have
a co-wife with many siblings to talk to, I always believed that I have the perfect
home. Regardless, I have no right in the house to make decision with regard to
material object and setting of my own room. I always believe that the family
relationship is the most beautiful gift that God has bless me with, been the
last born of an extended family, I feel the love, care, belongingness, and cherish
received from my family. However, getting marriage and having my own family
have made me realized that the meaning of home to me have change in a sense
that I have to be responsible of my house and make decisions. These experiences
and meaning have made me reflect on the meaning and experiences of home for people
with disabilities and seniors.
In
regards to people with disability and senior, it worth exploring the experiences
and meaning of home choices of where to live, type of house they want to live,
and the material objects of the houses. I believe these are important questions
to ask, as individuals without disabilities we have the choices to choose were
we want to live making the experiences and meaning of home completely different
from people who do not have the independent or right to choose their homes. As
stated by Stancliffe et al (2011), individuals with disabilities and seniors
often lack the freedom to choose with whom they live and where they reside.
Therefore, the important of choices to home living is a vital part of meaning
and experience of home. According to DiGennaro Reed et al (2014), moving people
with disabilities or seniors against their desire to large nursing facilities
or other less-preferred settings rather than optimizing environmental supports
in their own home or in less restrictive settings. Stancliffe et al ( 2011)
posited that not only do adults enjoy greater choice when they live in their
own homes relative to individuals living in congregate care or group home
settings, but also independent and semi-independent settings are also
associated with better outcomes.
Connecting
this to our last class discussion we all have this live reality and idealized
meaning of home but what about those who have these idealize meaning but could
not made the choices or decisions on were to live. In additions to choices, another
important aspect of meaning and experiences of home is control access to person
space, I personality believe that when it comes to physical design and layout
of our home, it has to perfectly fit our personality. However, with regard to
disable people especially people with mobility difficult to move around the
physical design and layout of houses become so important to their life. As
stated by Imrie (2004), a person’s mental and physical
well-being is related to many circumstances, not the least of which is the
quality of their dwelling and home environment. In my view, an important part
of such quality includes the physical design and layout and how it enables the
ease of peoples’ mobility and movement around the dwelling, and the use of
different rooms and facilities. Lastly, the author stated, “disabled people’s
domestic experiences are, potentially, at odds with the (ideal) conceptions of
the home as a haven, or a place of privacy, security, independence and control”
(Imrie, 2004, p. 745). In part, this is because “design conceptions, in
relation to floor plans and allocation of functions to specific spaces, do not
conceive of impairment, disease and illness as part of domestic habitation or
being” (Imrie, 2004, p.746 ).
References:
Imrie,
R. (2004). Disability, embodiment and the meaning of the home. Housing studies,
19(5), 745-763.
Reed,
F. D. D., Strouse, M. C., Jenkins, S. R., Price, J., Henley, A. J., &
Hirst, J. M. (2014). Barriers to independent living for individuals with
disabilities and seniors. Behavior analysis in practice, 7(2), 70-77.
Stancliffe, R. J.,
Lakin, K. C., Larson, S., Engler, J., Taub, S., & Fortune, J. (2011).
Choice of living arrangements. Journal of Intellectual Disability Research,
55(8), 746-762.
Thank you for your post! Your response reminded me of my great-granddaddy and other elderly people I have close relationships with. One of my interests is in gerontology so hearing about senior citizens in the home is especially interesting to me. On Friday nights I am a Senior Friend to older adults in the Athens area through Good Works. Every Friday night I share a meal with the community and have built relationships with many elderly women and couples.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorite medical authors, Atul Gawande, has a book about ageing and death. Being Mortal delves into societal and medical attitudes towards the two “unsolvable” things, death and ageing. Both are inevitable yet Gawande highlights how society and medicine avoids the discussion of mortality. It appears that with medical advancements, increased health outcomes, and life spans, mortality and ageing is increasingly medicalized. There has been a transition from the family and social support of aged populations towards modern nursing homes and elderly communities. As children or grandchildren, we like to believe this transition is good and helping our loved ones live longer but as revealed in Being Mortal perhaps there should be a change in focus on morality and ageing. Atul Gawande said in an interview, “We have medicalized aging, and that experiment is failing us.” Gawande is a surgeon at Harvard and uses his experiences in medical practice and personal stories to reveal the problems in the current approach towards the elderly and examines alternative solutions towards improving life for our aging populations. The book reflects on human mortality but also has great insight into assisted living and other alternatives for elderly care besides nursing homes and hospital like settings. Gawande references Asylums and notes the commonalities of nursing homes and prison. In the book it is said, “We allow children to take more risks than the elderly. At least children get monkey bars and slides.”
All of my “senior friends” are much like my great granddaddy was until he passed away at 99. My great granddaddy was extremely independent. He lived in the house next door to me until he moved to an assisted living facility at 97. My family reached a point where we were no longer able to care for him properly so moved my great granddaddy to an assisted living facility after a lot of consideration. He was a lot healthier while in the facility and still only lived 10 minutes away. My family would visit everyday and bring things from home. Despite his improvement in health, I knew my great granddaddy missed the home and built and the independence home can give.
While home is often a physical place, perhaps we can bring more of a sense of home to those who are unable to continue living in their current home. In class we talked about how home can be a comfortable place, connected to family, independence, or freedom for many. How might we bring these qualities to those in nursing homes and assisted living facilities while still ensuring they receive the care they need. I believe that ageing has become so medicalized that we forget that home, place, and emotional comfort are just as important in the well-being of people.
Gawande, A. (2014). Being mortal: Medicine and what matters in the end. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books.
I too found Imrie's discussion of how disabled people experience home as something that deviates from the ideal conceptions of the home as a place of security, privacy, and independence interesting for thinking about the relationship between social ideals and lived experience. I appreciate that you highlight the ways in which the built environment of a home can interact with these normative associations for disabled people in particular. Personally, I think about this a lot; I have disabling chronic illnesses that cause widespread chronic pain and fatigue, as well as varying mobility. Though living in a home that had access to certain material needs such as a full sized bathtub (standing during a shower can exhaust me for days in certain circumstances) and ground floor access, my current home has only a small shower in the bathroom and is up a flight of external stairs. In some ways, these material realities do impede my experience of home as a place of sanctuary and security. Some days I am effectively "trapped" in my home, unable to traverse the stairs outside.
ReplyDeleteThough I agree that this is an important takeaway from Imrie's article and I have had first-hand experience with these dynamics, I was more interested in how Imrie presented the stories of disabled embodiments of home as necessitating a fundamental reassessment of the meanings we attach to home. He argues that there is a need to "corporealise" the meaning of home, recognizing that impaired corporeality can be a part of home life rather than a deviation from the norm (p. 746). Imrie finds that most respondents described living in the home as achieved "by accepting, and adapting to, the standards of design that reflect the primacy of non-impaired bodies" (p. 752).
The need to physically adapt the home environment to fit with the needs of an impaired body reminded me of the article we read by Hansen and Philo (2006) that presented the "normality of doing things differently" as a core strategy used by disabled people in navigating spaces constructed with non-impaired bodies in mind. The difficulty that disabled people face in navigating space both in public and in the home speaks to the degree to which we as a society have yet to develop a comfort level associated with impairment, fatigue, and pain as "normal" features of embodiment (Hansen and Philo, 2007, p. 501-502). Both Imrie and Hansen and Philo call for the body as a space where the material (or biological) interacts with the social to be part of the conversation about space/place/home. In doing so, these disability studies scholars call for a radical reimagining of normative embodiment, with implications for both disabled and non-disabled people as they think about, interact with, and move through space.