Surfacing Moves: Spatial-Timings of Senior Home Care

Like many countries, Sweden faces the challenge of population aging and senior care. Compared with institutionalized health care, senior home care offers a viable option, promising familiar surroundings and lower costs. However, those performing senior home care sometimes resist time-management policies that pressure such care in practice. Some scholars analyze this situation as opposition between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ time. This article takes a different route. It explores how time surfaces in Swedish senior home care through relational movements of care. These enlist things such as schedules, machines, and aging bodies. To this end, the article also experiments with ‘surfacing’ as an ethnographic heuristic for figuring these different ‘spatial-timings’. The article concludes that surfacing matters not only in senior home care but also in the field-desks of ethnographic analysis.