Blog: At home at the HSA conference!

We all need “our people” – those we connect with – people with whom it just clicks! Walking into the ECR Symposium at the HSA conference felt very much like a space for this. The symposium allowed for thoughtful discussion on who we were as academics or practitioners – or pracademics – in the housing space. In fact, the entire week was a time for such reflection with conversations and interactions that built into inspiration and vision for housing. If I am being honest, I felt that connection on issues related to housing with every person I met at the HSA Conference.   

The conference, titled: Healthy Homes, Healthy Lives: Exploring the Intersections of Health and Housing, was well organised and there was the chance to attend many of the workshops in addition to the keynote and plenary sessions. I really appreciated the opportunity to present my work, which is very much on-going, in what I found to be a very congenial atmosphere. People showed so much support towards what I was doing and affirmed that my ideas made sense and were timely. I was particularly inspired by the range of people from different sectors at the conference – besides academics at all stages of their careers, there were people from government, from healthcare and from the non-profit sector, which made for really engaging discussion. It was awesome to see such an important issue being taken so seriously, with each person convinced that their work was valuable and could make a difference. I left the conference feeling the same way about my own work.

Home is increasingly the site for ageing in Scotland, and around 90 % of the 1 million older people live at home independently, either with a partner or alone – this is usually what they prefer (Scottish Govt, 2011). In addition to being the site of ageing, home is increasingly the site for the use of digital technology, highlighted by the number of services and entertainment advertised as being possible from the comfort of your own home! As people age at home, it also becomes the site where healthcare is enacted. During the course of my PhD at the University of St Andrews and Bonn University I have begun to understand the experience of ageing at home where technology is a ubiquitous part of home. 

‘I learned very quickly that it was very good for me. Since I was already familiar with the phone and the tablet, this was quite easy for me to figure out’…‘If I didn’t have this smart watch (when I went on extended holiday), I don’t know if I’d have the courage to make the trip – it makes me very secure that I can look after my health wherever I am'. (Quote from research participant)

My work considers ageing at home as assemblage – the daily interactions of human and non-human actants with each other and with the environment they exist in. These human-material interactions are characterised by a constant interplay of stability and fluidity as they emerge and then recur (Müller and Schurr, 2016). Every actant also has potentiality – capabilities that are beyond the ones being used in the present, which can emerge when the situation calls for it. Emergence occurs when objects are situated in relation to humans and within certain environments: they display the ability to take on function and meaning, as if they were more than just physical matter – the components become co-related through an on-going process. As these processes occur repeatedly, they become ‘habit’, showing recurrence (Bridge, 2021).  Considering home as assemblage helps us understand the experiences of older people – some who use technology effortlessly, others who struggle with it and about a fifth of people over the age of 75, who are not connected to the Internet at all. Looking at that space between the human and the material and coming to terms with what is going on there brings a clearer allows us to unpack lived experience.

'The systems change so fast. We are forced to do banking online. We ask for a personal appointment and say you tell us how to do it. If we are lucky we will actually get someone we can understand, otherwise it is just a young man behind the desk saying do this this and this – it’s very easy. Then I have to stop him and say no, you show me – and then I write down what I need to do in a way that I will understand. Their most common answer actually is ask your grandchild – that answer could not be more wrong! These kids are born into this technology and they don’t understand why we can’t get along side it. It feels like there is a huge gap – it’s really like we are speaking different languages.' (Quote from research participant)

It is quite clear from my interviews with older people in Scotland, that the experience of ageing at home with technology is a mixed bag – ranging from increased convenience and a sense of security to confusion and a sense of being totally lost and marginalised. Home is not limited to the house that a person lives in, but rather spans the entire sphere of influence, support and decision making. Approaching ageing at home as assemblage brings the agenda alongside the Scottish Government's strategy on self-directed support: this highlights the importance of informed choice, both in enabling older people to choose forms of support which reflect their lifestyles, and in securing a range of different services to support individual choice – stressing the importance of choice, control, freedom and dignity (Scottish Govt. 2011).

 ‘The bigger letters (on the new TV) are great and I can read the commentaries much better. It’s also easier to change channels as I can see the numbers’. ‘ My granddaughter was visiting and I heard her talking and then realised the channels were changing – the new television has a voice activated remote – I’d have never known that if she hadn’t come along!' (Quote from research participant)

Presenting these ideas at the ‘Healthy Ageing’ Workshop at the HSA conference was a great experience for me as it gave me the chance to feel for where my research fitted in with the housing and health landscape. To know more about my work please get in touch via [email protected].

References

Bridge, G. (2021) On pragmatism, Assemblage and ANT: Assembling Reason, Progress in Human Geography, Vol 45:3, pp.417-614.  

Müller, M. and Schurr, C. (2016) Assemblage thinking and actor-network theory: conjunctions, disjunctions, cross-fertilisations, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol 41, pp. 217–229. doi: 10.1111/tran.12117 

Scottish Government (2011), Age, home and community: a strategy for housing for Scotland's older people 2012-2021, Scottish Government.