Case A
A handbag and the making of a boundary
Helena Cleeve is a friend going back to our master’s in Transdisciplinary Design in New York City in 2012. Here, we case study a project, entitled, Markings: Boundaries and Borders in Dementia Care Units (2020) and component of her doctoral research. The research project, in her words, studies “material markings in a nursing home and the boundaries and borders negotiated by them” (Cleeve 2020). She explains, “During fieldwork, I made a total of 694 [in-situ] drawings depicting various aspects of everyday life in the [dementia care] units.” I lean heavily on Helena’s own writing for her to speak for her own work. All of the quoted text here is from Helena’s article, Markings (Cleeve 2020).
Helena describes the printed and hand-written labels and markings made for residents in the nursing homes: “I had seen markings [in nursing homes] before, but I had not thought much of them. In this setting, they seemed both commonplace and indisputable. However, there was something about this particular encounter that I found disconcerting and it led to questions about markings and their consequences.”
“I cannot stop thinking about Solveig’s handbag. Over the next few weeks I talk to a staff member as well as her daughter about this.”
Her child did it,
one of her other handbags had gone missing.
— Staff member, October 23, 2018Mom often things that people are stealing
from her and she takes other people’s things too.
But for Mom it’s not that big a deal:
if her handbag or wallet are missing
she’ll just take someone else’s.Now I’ve marked all of her things
to make it easier for the staff.
—Daughter, November 15, 2018
“The marking on the handbag can be seen as an attempt by the daughter to maintain and care for Solveig’s material boundaries as she could not do this herself. …Yet, the marking implied something else too: a sense of despair or, perhaps, brutality? When I showed the drawing at a workshop, staff members said that it made Solveig seem incompetent and someone made associations to prisons. Here, what is usually considered private becomes a public matter. … The growing scholarship concerning “materialities of care”, … calls attention to everyday material things within various care practices as something that sheds light on important, but often neglected, interactions (Buse, Martin, and Nettleton 2018; Cleeve, Borell, and Rosenberg 2019; Cleeve et al. 2018; Latimer 2018; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010).”
Helena describes her choices to sit with residents and make drawings. Her descriptions trace the outlines of the embodied approach and sensibility she has for working with people’s experience: “I spent time with the residents and took part in their everyday lives. While doing so, I made in-situ drawings and used a sketchbook and a pencil. Nursing home residents typically have quite varied capabilities, which calls for inclusive and considerate research methods. … Initial analysis took place after each visit, as I reviewed drawings and wrote about each depicted situation along with my reflections and questions. The examples of markings were organized into different patterns as a way to think with and through my data (Mammersley and Atkinson 2007, 168).”
“The ways in which seemingly trivial markings become entangled with residents’ identities and agencies require ethical responsiveness. Barad (2007, 158) asserts that no definite boundaries exist; rather, they depend on social practices. She exemplifies this through the phenomena of a “disabled body”, writing that “‘able-bodiedness’ is not a natural state of being but a specific form of embodiment that is co-constituted through the boundary-making practices that distinguish ‘able-bodied’ from ‘disabled’”. Hence, the uncertainty of boundaries becomes especially clear when a body “breaks down.” As we participate in these boundary-making processes, we have a responsibility towards what is excluded (Barad, 2007). … It is thus worth asking which markings matter, how they matter, and for whom.”
Read more about Helena Cleeve’s work here.
References
Helena Cleeve. “Markings: Boundaries and Borders in Dementia Care Units.” Design and Culture, 12:1, 5–29. (2020).
Read more from this publication
Case A | A handbag and the making of a boundary
Case B | A deck of cards and a vocabulary for social choices
Case C | A collection of home things and the gauging of limits
Case D | A balcony and a way of caring
Case E | A city playground and the connection of family and everyday life
Case F | A hacienda as an “instrument” to notice and wonder
