Rethinking Care in an Aging World; Everyday Ethics in Elder Caregiving: Participant Observation at the Rowan Center

As aging populations rise and formal caregiving systems strain under economic and institutional pressures, dementia care becomes a site of urgent ethical, relational, and political concern. This thesis explores an alternative model of elder care through ethnographic fieldwork at the Rowan Center, an adult day care center in North Carolina that centers autonomy, embodied selfhood, and relational presence over biomedical management. Through participant observation and in-depth interviews, I trace how caregivers and patients navigate moments of attunement, desire, resistance, and disorientation within a care philosophy that resists containment. Drawing on critical gerontology, medical anthropology, and phenomenological theory, I examine vignettes that foreground rhythms of clapping, longing for absent spouses, and gestures of romantic initiation—revealing how time, touch, and affect are reconfigured in the space of dementia care. This thesis argues that practices of “synchronization” and “temporal recalibration” open up new modes of intersubjectivity beyond the binaries of dependent/independent or ethical/unethical. Ultimately, the Rowan Center offers not only a more humane care model but a reimagining of citizenship, where belonging is enacted through presence rather than productivity, and where aging becomes a shared, relational act of meaning-making.