Dementia, infrastructural failure, and new relations of transnational care in Thailand

Geraldine Pratt,Caleb Johnston

doi:10.1111/tran.12445

Abstract

We draw on our ethnography of European‐owned care facilities in Thailand, designed for persons from the global north living with dementia, to address the current crisis in dementia care in the global north. Neither cultural approaches (that celebrate a Thai propensity to care for aging people) nor economic critique (focused on the exploitative relations between global north and south) fully or accurately represent the practices of care in these facilities. We outline the skilled nature of the dementia care on offer there, as well as non‐kin‐based relations of care that develop over time, to excite our imaginations of what is possible within long‐term care institutions in the global north. Focusing on skill addresses the chronic devaluation of elder care, and a close appraisal of the personal relations that develop in Thai transnational facilities displaces the family as the most appropriate locus of care. We frame this exploration within a notion of relational comparison, with the goal of cultivating a non‐innocent politics of hope under conditions of infrastructural failure.

Highlights

Julia's other daughter, living and working in Bangkok, heard from a work colleague of a care facility catering to Europeans with dementia in the north of Thailand in Chiang Mai and suggested that they visit for a couple of days after Christmas
It is important to note, that Thai care workers denaturalise their care work by being explicit that their labour is both skilled and learned. They situate their work within an ontology of care practised in northern Thailand and in relation to persons living with dementia
We met one instance when we stayed briefly at a new facility, being developed at that time by two Thai health professionals and a British man. They first met and came to know each other at another, established care facility, where the Thai caregivers worked and he was staying with his wife, who had advanced dementia

Summary

Introduction

It has to change.” Julia's other daughter, living and working in Bangkok, heard from a work colleague of a care facility catering to Europeans with dementia in the north of Thailand in Chiang Mai and suggested that they visit for a couple of days after Christmas. We turn to put our study of dementia care for Europeans in Thailand in conversation with the infrastructural failure that drives people from the global north to seek care for their loved ones so far from home.

Results

Conclusion