Dementia, infrastructural failure, and new relations of transnational care in Thailand

Abstract

We draw on our ethnography of European-owned care facilities in Thailand, designed for persons from the global north living with dementia, to address the current crisis in dementia care in the global north. Neither cultural approaches (that celebrate a Thai propensity to care for aging people) nor economic critique (focused on the exploitative relations between global north and south) fully or accurately represent the practices of care in these facilities. We outline the skilled nature of the dementia care on offer there, as well as non-kin-based relations of care that develop over time, to excite our imaginations of what is possible within long-term care institutions in the global north. Focusing on skill addresses the chronic devaluation of elder care, and a close appraisal of the personal relations that develop in Thai transnational facilities displaces the family as the most appropriate locus of care. We frame this exploration within a notion of relational comparison, with the goal of cultivating a non-innocent politics of hope under conditions of infrastructural failure.