ABSTRACT
What is it like to live in an aged care home? This book, drawing on a four-year qualitative study of older residents and their caregivers, uses the arts-based methods of participatory photography and research poetry to open up a dialogue about the past, present and future of care homes. It provides rare poetic and visual emotive insight into the frustration, lowlights, and highlights as residents adjust to the routines and rhythms of daily life in aged care. Arts-based research allows the reader to enter the unknown space of aged care to see and feel the emotions – with the photographs and poems surprising, informing and enchanting, communicating the memorable, mundane and ordinary moments of entering, living and dying in this uniquely communal setting. In the era of population ageing, this thoughtful chapter draws attention to an experience that is often feared and seldom discussed: aged care.
