In this fieldwork-based study, I aimed to acquire a deep understanding of whether and how elderly Australians could feel at home in a nursing home during the last stages of life. I did so by attempting to feel in my own body the movements that residents made so that I could share in them. The word ‘understanding’ here thus refers to the ethnographic insights I gained through experiencing other ways of being and then reflecting on my experience.
Undergoing an immersive process of gradual familiarization was key to my decision to use movement as the prime methodological vehicle. Various sensory engagements were used in this process to explore and understand the entire study environment. In adopting alternative roles—walking like residents, walking with residents, observing residents and staff walking, and writing a care plan to embed staff-assisted walking and transfer—the researcher becomes attuned to making ethnographic insights, both sensorially and affectively. In this process, as Latour argues, the body is to be thought of as ‘an interface that becomes more and more describable as it learns to be affected by more and more elements’ (2004, p. 206).
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