Care and rhythmanalysis: Using metastability to understand the routines of dementia care.

An increasing number of people living with dementia worldwide receive informal care from their family members. A key element of dementia care is maintaining a daily routine and familiarity, making caring an extremely rhythmic practice. To explore the rhythmic nature of informal care, we apply and advance Lefebvre's unfinished rhythmanalysis by developing an original typology of eurhythmia as a metastable equilibrium. Metastability, although appearing macroscopically stable, is a vulnerable state where a slight disturbance can result in deviation to another state (i.e., stable or unstable). Drawing upon interviews with informal caregivers, we discuss the rhythms and (dis)harmonies of caring practice, including the substantial rhythms of caring practice, the relational balance of rhythms between the caregiver and care recipient, and the various rhythmic disruptions that occur. We demonstrate how metastability provides an understanding of the ever-changing rhythms of every day and allows us to move beyond the immediacy of arrhythmic breaks and explore the subtle changes that occur in (poly)rhythms. Thus, eurhythmia as a metastable equilibrium allows us to explore the gradual and subtle development of, and changes to, dementia care and other routine practices in health geography.

The role of performativity in informal dementia carers' capability to be mobile.

Informal carers are and will remain a vital part of dementia care. Given the nature of their caring tasks, which focus on enabling the care recipient to engage in meaningful activities, informal dementia carers are affected in their everyday mobility. Expectations manifested by society, loved ones and the carers themselves play a critical role in how carers perform their caring role and how they perceive their opportunity, or capability, to be mobile. This article uses Butler's concept of performativity to understand informal dementia carers' capability to be mobile. In the spring and summer of 2021, we combined remote graphic elicitation with telephone interviews to gather the views of 17 informal dementia carers (aged 50+) living in England. Three key themes emerged from our analysis of the data. Firstly, participants perceived that becoming a carer changed their capability to be mobile. Secondly, the caring role in relation to the capability to be mobile resulted in an emotional toll and perceived loss of autonomy. Thirdly, the performativity of the caring role created feelings of guilt, selfishness and resentment due to the impact caring had on participants' capability to be mobile. Our study enriches the literature on informal dementia carers' mobility, as we suggest that performativity is a key factor in how this population experiences their everyday mobility. The findings suggest that existing ageing-in-place policies should take a more holistic approach by better including those ageing adults who provide the most support: informal dementia carers.