Choreographing care: family care-giving and implications of home in Singapore

Abstract Care-giving comprises everyday tasks that revolve around the home, yet few studies have examined care-giving as practices that shape home as a place of care in Singapore. This article focuses on the choreographed routines that arrange people, activities and things at home for care-giving of older persons with various needs, examining the effects of these socio-material arrangements on the home as a place of belonging, intimacy, safety and control. Building on literature on care assemblages and sociology of home, it examines five case studies that showcase how care-givers appropriated, adapted and improvised in situations of uncertainty, conflict and competing demands while providing care for their ageing loved ones. It highlights different practices and configurations of people and things as well as varying experiences and intensities of care-giving, through three themes: the interplay of physical, social and emotional proximities; socio-economic leverage and inequalities that enable or constrain care-giving; and distributed agencies across spaces. Care assemblages are characterized by tensions, yet held together by ideals and idealization of home, rooted in everyday realities and shaped by socio-economic conditions and government policy directions. This article contributes to understanding the relationship between care-giving and home, highlighting the complexity of ageing in place’ beyond maintaining older adults in existing residences to encompass the dynamic reconfiguration of domestic spaces into viable care environments. It has implications for policy makers seeking to support ageing-in-place initiatives, practitioners working with family care-givers and researchers examining the spatial dimensions of care in multicultural societies with significant migrant domestic worker populations.