Autoethnographic Reflections on Ageing, Bodies, and Olding as Ontology of Care

This piece traces how I became involved in social research, methodology, and theory—‘ways of knowing’—that are concerned with care, bodies, practices, intimacies, materialities, and affects. In the article I have focussed particularly on my early experiences with older people, as both a nurse and a sociologist, and on how I developed a critical, theoretically engaged ethnographic methodology. I know I couldn’t have become the writer, teacher, supervisor, and thinker that I have without my early experiences of doing care and becoming-with older people. These helped me realise that I needed to find ways to make visible how, where, and when older people are emplaced and marginalised, and how ‘ageing’ is situated in and by contemporary culture, including by the very institutions that supposedly support growing older—for example biomedicine, and health and social care.