ABSTRACT
The devolution of long-term health and social care into the homes of Canadians is changing the meanings, physical conditions and spatio-temporal ordering of both domestic life and health care work in such homes. When services are required for months or even years, the home must function simultaneously as a personal dwelling, a setting for domestic life and a site for complex, labor-intensive care work. Blurring the boundary between the public sector of health care and the private sphere of the home may well be cost-saving from the perspective of the state but brings into play a set of dynamics that complicates the transference of professional and institutional functions and discourses into homespace. Furthermore, the returning of care to the home discounts the heterogeneity of homespaces within which care is provided, not only in terms of the home’s materiality, but also as a space redolent with social and symbolic meanings.
