A Place to Sit

Based on a study of people with dementia living in a nursing home, this article examines the impact on residents of a surveillance culture and their responses to it. This discussion focuses on resistance strategies employed by residents to create private space in a public place. Residents frequently longed for home, a safe maternal place distanced from the nursing home. Selecting a place to sit signifies and encapsulates the essence of findings from this ethnography and is used to illustrate the irony of denying even this choice to residents when sitting is one of the few activities they do. Going beyond previous work, this article provides an extensive exploration of resident resistance to a nursing home and shows people with dementia actively creating privacy and something resembling home.