At home in the ‘home’? Narratives of home in repertoires of institutional dining

Abstract

Home is not only a concrete place and a complex system of relations, but also an end-in-view that connects perceived shortcomings in the current versions of home with the desired goals and the means to achieve them. Our case study centres on a dining improvement project which strives to create home in residential institutions for people identified as disabled by serving a ‘home-like meal’. We describe three versions of home that are enacted in residential institutions – home as a commune, home as a private space and home as an intimate sphere – and document how they influence the serving of meals. We combine pragmatic theory of valuation with ethnographic research of home-making practices to assess the feasibility of these ends-in-view in relation to the housing options available to the disabled-identified. We show that when the realization of the chosen goals proves unfeasible under present circumstances, the discrepancies between the desired and actual versions of home can be effaced through various re-contextualization strategies. Of the three versions of home encountered during our intervention/research, the home enacted as an intimate sphere is the one most firmly grounded in clients’ real wishes and needs, and therefore the one most favourable to positive change.

Keywords:

• Residential home
• institutional dining
• pragmatic theory of valuation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Liat Ben-Moshe for convening the Critical Disability Studies Caucus II The home which is not one: Disability and institutional ‘home’ at the American Studies Association’s Annual Meeting in Denver, CO, in 2016, where material used in this article was first presented, and for her stimulating comments. For their comments on previous versions of the article, we would also like to thank Terezie Lokšová and other students of Zdeněk Konopásek’s doctoral seminars at the Centre for Theoretical Study of Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences, as well as Jeannette Pols, Walter Lorenz, Kateřina Lišková, Andrea Bělehradová, Lenka Hadarová and the anonymous reviewers of Housing Studies. Last but not least, we would like to express our gratitude to the inhabitants (past and present) and employees of the residential institutions where our research for this article took place.

The meal improvement intervention described in the article was realized as part of the ‘Gerontological and organisational supervision’ project, a joint project of the Gerontological Centre, the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University and the Czech Alzheimer Society. It obtained ethical approval from the Ethics Committee of the Gerontological Centre and was implemented with the agreement of the Regional Authority. The Czech Science Foundation’s grant GA ČR 19-07724S/P404, through which the analysis of the data and the publication of the article was supported, obtained ethical approval from the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 The collocation ‘mental impairment’ is probably the closest English translation of the most widely used Czech term. By putting it in quotation marks, we distance ourselves from its offensive use, while the process of its construction – which we call ‘labelling’ – is attended to in detail in the fifth section of the article.

2 Since adopting the new post-socialist law on social services in 2007 (Parliament of the Czech Republic, 2006), people inhabiting ‘homes for persons with health impairments’ have been called ‘service users’, or more colloquially ‘clients’, reflecting the prevailing neo-liberal emphasis on customer/supplier relationships. While it might be more accurate to call the main protagonists of our stories simply ‘diners’, ‘eaters’ or ‘inhabitants’, we stick to the terms most widely used on both sides of the user/provider divide.

3 Many project participants considered interventions into the seating order an effective way of improving the ambience in the dining hall.

4 All names have been changed.

5 Italics in original.

Additional information

Funding

This publication was supported by the Czech Science Foundation under grant GA ČR 19-07724S/P404 ‘Vulnerable residents in fragile residences: An inquiry into tensions of residential care’. The presentation of a pilot study at the American Studies Association’s Annual Meeting in Denver was made possible by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic thanks to the grant ‘Institutional support for long-term development of research organisations’, which was awarded to Charles University’s Faculty of Humanities in 2016 and to Masaryk University’s Faculty of Social Studies from 2014 to 2018. The meal improvement intervention described in the article was realized as part of the ‘Gerontological and organisational supervision’ project funded by the Regional Authority.

Notes on contributors

Michal Synek

Michal Synek is a sociologist and an ethnographer. He has explored issues such as organisation of care for people living with dementia, meal provision in residential institutions, care and maintenance practices in ‘homes’ for people identified as disabled, and, most recently, life stories of people with the diagnosis of mental impairment. He works as a senior researcher at the Department of Applied Social Sciences of the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University. He is interested in theoretical problems with practical impact at the intersections of science and technology studies, disability studies, and care studies.

Dana Hradcová

Dana Hradcová studies inter/dependency, dis/ablement and emancipation of people identified as disabled from the perspective of care studies and empirical ethics. She has been involved in transdisciplinary research projects related to life with dis/ability, addressing the challenges of de/institutionalization and long-term care. In her teaching to social and health care workers and managers of the social and health care services she focuses on collaborative learning and actions exploring and developing the services through co-production, ethnography and narrative interviews.