Freedom in Dementia Care? On Becoming Better Bound to the Nursing Home

If closed doors in an institution are deprivation of freedom of movement, do open doors create it, or do they do something different altogether? The challenge for care workers is how to guarantee the safety of residents while not restricting their freedom of movement (too much). Based on fieldwork in one care home with an open door policy, we explore what freedom becomes in routines and practices that allow doors to be open. We show how the possibility to open doors – to, for instance, a dog, or to step outside and come right back in – leaves residents feeling less confronted by mobility restrictions and thus more at home in the nursing home. These ‘door interactions’ offer residents the possibility to have a position to ‘speak’ from, even if in non-verbal ways (cf. Pols 2005). We draw upon what Driessen has elsewhere described as ‘sociomaterial will-work’ (forthcoming), to show how care workers seek to bring about residents’ wanting to stay inside, reconfiguring staying inside as something positive. Thinking with Antoine Hennion’s notion of ‘attachments’ (Gomart and Hennion 1999; Hennion 2007) and Bruno Latour’s suggestion to think about freedom in terms of being ‘well’ or ‘poorly’ attached (1999: 22-23), we contend that the practices that allow the doors to be open bring in a new dimension that contributes to residents’ being ‘better bound’ to the nursing home.