Restorative home environments for family caregivers

Caregiver stress negatively affects caregiver health and the overall quality of in-home caregiving. While environmental interventions such as home modifications help caregivers manage stressful functional aspects, interventions for managing stressful emotional aspects are unexplored. Frequently, caregiving responsibilities restrict caregivers' spatial and temporal range of restorative activities to their familial residential environment. In a first attempt to explore the restorative potential of a house in which caregiving occurs, this paper reports experiential attributes of restorative environments from environmental psychology and healthcare design research. It discusses the relevance of restorative attributes to the socio–physical residential context of caregiving using three caregiver needs: need for a temporary escape, meaningful social support, and a sense of control. This conceptual exploration of the restorative potential of the residential caregiving environment offers a base for investigating targeted architectural and functional interventions that might complement current advances in home modifications and respite services.     

Risk and Respectability: Reinventing Sexuality in State-NGO HIV Prevention Programs

Qualitative Sociology - The “AIDS industry” has been a contested topic for scholars of sex work and sexuality in India. Predictions of an AIDS crisis in India in the 1990s led to an...     

Establishing Continuity of Self-Memory Boxes in Dementia Facilities for Older Adults: Their Use and Usefulness

Spatial and detailed design aspects of dementia care centers deserve attention because they contribute to the overall experience of vulnerable individuals who need more support from the designed environment. This study examined the use and usefulness of memory boxes (wall-mounted display cases) at the entrances to resident rooms in dementia care facilities. Environmental walk-throughs, photodocumentation, memory box inventory, and staff interviews in three residential care facilities confirmed that memory boxes were beneficial in creating identity, assisting in orientation and wayfinding, and encouraging reminiscence. An additional use that emerged from this study was their usefulness as a tool for staff.     

Is Sex Work Sex or Work? Forming Collective Identity in Bangalore

While sex worker activism grows increasingly vibrant around the world, the forms and practices of sex work vary widely, and are often secret. How do sex workers come to see themselves as sex worker activists? What tensions emerge in the formation of collective identity within sex worker activist organizations, especially when the term “sex work” has often traveled linked to transnational organizations and funding? To answer these questions, this article analyzes in-depth interviews and participant observation on sex worker activism in Bangalore, India. Focusing on an organization I call the Union, I argue that it was first within the “shop floor” of transnationally funded HIV prevention organizations, and then within the activist work of the Union, that sex workers came to identify collectively as activists at a large scale. However, distinct configurations of practice among gendered groups of sex workers in Bangalore meant each group related differently to the formation of a sex worker activist collective identity. Two aspects of sex workers’ practice emerged as particularly central: varying experiences of sex work as “sex” or as “work,” and varying levels of anonymity and visibility in public spaces. Organizing through transnationally funded HIV prevention programs helped solidify these categories of differentiation even as it provided opportunities to develop shared self-hood.