Narratives of Ageing and Materiality The Experience of Home in Older People’s Residential Care

Abstract

The body is a site on which ageing occurs and is also the means by which we navigate and experience a material world. As our bodies change as we age, so too do our experiences of (and interactions with) our material environment. This article presents findings from an ethnographic study of the experiences of everyday life among residents of an older people’s home in northern England. I draw on the concept of the ‘embodied life course’ (Marshall and Katz 2012) to argue that residents’ feelings about being and becoming at home were shaped by their embodied, temporal and socio-material experiences throughout their lives, and that these experiences continued throughout their time in the residential home.