ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the application of a care aesthetics lens to the authors’ practice as TimeSlips storytelling facilitators in a Sydney dementia unit, considering also how that practice ‘speaks back’ to care aesthetics. Inspired by a care aesthetics approach to the senses and interhuman relations, the author-facilitators explore the challenges arising from diverse bodyminds and the pursuit of more equitable relations within TimeSlips sessions. They demonstrate how care aesthetics supplements the TimeSlips orientation to distal senses through attention to proximal senses, and how the sessions illuminated traces of normative ideas about able-bodiedness within both TimeSlips and care aesthetics. Regarding interhuman relations, the authors consider how care aesthetics can help negotiate power differentials and constraints on storyteller autonomy, and how its relational view of autonomy clarifies the presence of a liberal notion of autonomy within both TimeSlips and residential aged care. This notion assumes an independent, fully able bodymind, concealing the caring relations that make human autonomy possible. Out of the dialogue between care aesthetics and TimeSlips emerges a greater awareness of how facilitators can and will have to juggle both the normative ideas about bodyminds and the diverse notions of autonomy that are at play within Western aged care contexts.
