ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I explore the role of the ethnographer’s age and “lived research experience” in shaping the analysis of institutional care by revisiting two field studies I conducted of the residential care of young people in Finland. The first study was my PhD research, which focused on the social construction of “deviance” of the young people placed in three reform schools. The second study was undertaken more than 10 years later in two of the reform schools involved in the first study, this time documenting the lived experiences of the young residents. In both cases, I stayed in the institutions for several months and took part in the daily activities of the institutions in a variety of ways, carried out interviews, some recorded, some not, read documents, and asked young people to take photographs of daily life in the institutions. While the emphasis of this chapter is on revisiting those fieldwork periods, the chapter also plays with the idea of doing these studies one more time as a person soon to retire. What would it be like to do an ethnography of those institutions now at my age?
