School of Social and Political Science

Description

In this talk, I will discuss how domestic dementia care exposes the limits and incongruities of kinship, by focusing on how a rural family understood and cared for people with dementia at home during the COVID-19 pandemic in China. While filial piety is often invoked as the precondition of care, grounded in reciprocal parent-child relations, I argue that kinship desires, expectations, practices and orderings become incongruous with one another when facing challenging illness conditions and intensive care works. In this process, the family was reconfigured as ‘inside-out’ by its shifting kinship dynamic and the broader socio-economic crises during the pandemic.