Book Review 
 
Review of Pasveer, Bernike, Oddgeir Synness, and 
Ingunn Moser, eds. Ways of Home Making in Care for 
Later Life. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2020. Price: 
$125 (Hardcover); $101 (eBook).  

 

Francisca Yuenki Lai 

National Tsing Hua University 
laiyk@mx.nthu.edu.tw 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anthropology & Aging, Vol 43, No 2 (2022), pp. 102-104 

ISSN 2374-2267 (online) DOI 10.5195/aa.2022.430 

 

  

 

 
 

 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 

 
This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as 

part of its 

D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program, and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. 



           Book Review | Yuenki Lai |  

  

 

Anthropology & Aging  

Vol 43 No 2 (2022) ISSN 2374-2267 (online) DOI 10.5195/aa.2022.430 http://anthro-age.pitt.edu 

102 

 

 
Book Review 
 
Review of Pasveer, Bernike, Oddgeir Synness, and 

Ingunn Moser, eds. Ways of Home Making in Care for 
Later Life. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2020. Price: 
$125 (Hardcover); $101 (eBook). 

 

Francisca Yuenki Lai 

National Tsing Hua University 
laiyk@mx.nthu.edu.tw 

 

  

 

Ways of Home Making in Care for Later Life examines the intersections of home, care, and older adults. In 

the introduction, the editors set the stage by encouraging the reader to understand home as a verb and 

to envisage how home intersects with care in later life as a making. The book covers different types of 

families in these home making practices, including adult children living with their parents (Chapters 2 

and 11), families who have members with the diagnosis of dementia (Chapters 4 and 14), and 

transnational families (Chapters 3 and 12). In addition, the book also focuses on different loci of home 

making and covers this process at different (semi-)institutional settings, such as co-housing initiatives, 

nursing homes, and residential dementia care institutions (Chapters 7, 8, 9, 10, and 13). Although all the 

chapters focus on Western societies—mainly Australia, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and the United 

Kingdom (UK)—the book also contains chapters that touch on transnational families (including Karen 

and Italian migrants in Australia and Sudanese migrants in the UK and the Netherlands).    

 

At the intersection of two protean concepts like ‘home’ and ‘care,’ the editors reveal a wealth of 

practices, relations, and affects that push contemporary research on care and belonging forward. The 

book is organized in three thematic sections: “Moving Imaginaries,” “Negotiating Institutions,” and 

“Shifting Arrangements.” The “Moving Imaginaries” section investigates the home imaginaries held 

and performed by older adults, older migrants, and people with dementia, as well as by government 

authorities and students in architecture. A central lesson from this part is that these imaginaries are not 

fixed but continuously transform and make (new) interpretations of home with care possible. The 

second section, “Negotiating Institutions,” contains rich discussions of the ideals of homeliness and care 

practice in institutional contexts. This part shows that the intersections of home and care are ongoing 

experiments that disrupt as well as open up places of care. The chapters in the last section, “Shifting 

Arrangements,” argue that home need not to be a place but is first and foremost a quality of shifting 

arrangements of people, things, places and affects. This perspective allows the reader to understand 

care in later life as circulating and reciprocal, especially when home is not bounded to a singular place.  

  

As the editors explain in the introduction, the purpose of using verbs (moving, negotiating, and shifting) 

instead of nouns in the section titles is to “deeply uproot the trope of home and care as somehow fixed 

and stable repository” (6). The book shows how the meanings of “home” shift across various boundaries 

in the home making process, namely national boundaries (e.g., the experience of transnational families), 

the boundary between public and private (e.g., who defines and maintains boundaries between public 

and private life at care institutions), and the boundaries between safety and homeliness (e.g., dealing 

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           Book Review | Yuenki Lai |  

  

 

Anthropology & Aging  

Vol 43 No 2 (2022) ISSN 2374-2267 (online) DOI 10.5195/aa.2022.430 http://anthro-age.pitt.edu 

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with issues such as whether stairs should be removed or surveillance cameras installed at home). The 

volume offers ample examples of different ways in which boundaries are negotiated for home making. 

Loretta Baldassar, Raelene Wilding, and Shane Worrell (Chapter 3) articulate the concepts of “local 

home making,” “community home making,” and “digital home making” to analyse the different ways 

the Karen and Italian older migrants in Australia sustain their ideals of home when some of their kin 

members are living overseas. They pay particular attention to how care is done in a transnational setting 

with the help of digital technologies. Wiring money (financial support) and making video calls 

(emotional exchanges) have become important means for older migrants to provide care to their 

overseas family members and sustain the ideals of home.  

 

With the concepts of “tinkering” (204) and “breaching experiments” (203), Bernike Pasveer (Chapter 10) 

captures how boundaries of home and care, private and public, and life and death are negotiated at the 

hospice. She uses the ethnographic example of Mrs. A, who was very ill with metastasized breast cancer 

and wanted to bring her sewing machine into the hospice to use after her condition would become 

relatively more stable. For Mrs. A, this would allow her to feel at home in the hospice. However, for the 

hospice staff this particular desire of Mrs. A demonstrates her unwillingness to face death, which runs 

counter to the aim of hospice care which is to make residents acknowledge and accept death in order to 

be able to achieve a “good death” (214). While the hospice encourages residents to bring in personal 

items to make themselves feel at home as a care technology, decisions on which items are welcome and 

which are not have become “breaching experiments” (203)—there are no clear guidelines, so both 

residents and care staff are tinkering with the specifics of care, while altering the meanings of ‘home’ 

and ‘good care’ in this process of negotiation.   

 

The book also includes a significant contribution to understanding the dynamic interplay between the 

caregiving role of older adults in a reciprocal care relationship and the meanings of home in later life. 

In Chapter 14, Christine Ceci, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols, ethnographically document “shifting 

arrangements” in home making for older couples, where one partner has dementia and the spouse takes 

up a caregiving role. The case of Ken and Marla documents very well that “what home means in 

concrete situations is the result of the relationships that organize those situations” (309), a process that 

equally implies the organization of “stuff” (309). At a certain point in the disease process and their life 

trajectory, Ken reports feeling that his home is disturbed as there is ‘no activity’ in the house, with daily 

activities becoming too complicated for Marla. Caring for Marla 24/7 also makes him feel “trapped” at 

home (307). Acting upon these feelings, Marla was admitted to a long-term care institution. 

Interestingly, after the move, Ken witnesses that he is working hard to organize activities and build up 

a new life to fight being “trapped at home,” now that he doesn’t have to take care of Marla anymore. 

The shifts in this story clearly show that for older adults—particularly when intensive caregiving is 

involved—‘home’ can come to mean different things in different circumstances, as relations, practices 

and “stuff” are rearranged along and across care. As the case of Ken and Marla illustrates, both 

permanent caregiving and the absence thereof in the home can cause a sense of entrapment with the 

primary caregiver.  

 

How does gender matter in the process of home making and care provision? In Chapter 8, Daniel López 

Gómez, Mariona Estrada Canal, and Lluvi Farré Montalà show how care work is both gendered and 

de-gendered, by comparing two senior co-housing initiatives in Spain, El Hogar and La Comunidad. The 

majority of the residents at El Hogar are single or widowed women. These women report appreciating 

that external staff at El Hogar is responsible for the housework because this leaves them with more time 

for their hobbies. In contrast, the majority of residents at La Comunidad are married couples and 45% of 

the residents are men. La Comunidad emphasizes mutual support rather than taking over care, leaving 

the residents fully responsible for hands-on daily tasks. It is common for the women to do informal care 

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           Book Review | Yuenki Lai |  

  

 

Anthropology & Aging  

Vol 43 No 2 (2022) ISSN 2374-2267 (online) DOI 10.5195/aa.2022.430 http://anthro-age.pitt.edu 

104 

while the men run errands. As the authors note, these two co-housing initiatives produce two different 

gendered modes of home making. Frode F. Jacobsen (Chapter 5) similarly investigates the intersections 

between care in later life and home making in analysing the politicization of aging-in-place in 

Norwegian public policy papers, with a focus on the diversity of older adults with regard to gender, 

social class and ethnicity. Jacobsen argues that the aging experience is shaped by culture; therefore the 

meaning of home and public policy on home care should take full consideration of social factors, such 

as gender and social status, as they shape the needs and preferences of different older women and men. 

Gender matters in the aging process. It could be as subtle as the daily division of labour between women 

and men at their place of residence or as significant as the public policies on service provision for women 

and men.  

 

Trained in the anthropological tradition, I find this book to be very engaging and a delight to read 

because most of the chapters provide solid case studies, interview quotes, and fieldnotes that unravel 

the relationship between the notions of home and care for older adults across the globe in different 

living situations. The book makes a valuable contribution to aging studies and care research, and is 

suitable for graduate students and researchers who are interested in aging subjectivities, meanings of 

home, care practice, and personhood.     
 

 

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