Beyond the evaluative lens: Contextual unpredictabilities of care

Abstract

Social science and gerontological research on care tends to focus on identifying practices that qualify as “good care” and promoting interventions that might produce it. In this article, we identify this approach to care as the “evaluative lens.” We argue that while useful, an evaluative approach to studying care can limit scholars' abilities to attend to the complex and disorderly aspects of care in daily life. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in three distinct contexts of elder care, we show the central role that contextual unpredictability plays in care experiences. In so doing, we argue for scholarship that recognizes care as a form of becoming, embedded in processual and historically contigent relations.