La sfida della grande vecchiaia: tra legami fluidi e riconversioni identitarie

The most part of the research paths that we have undertaken in recent years has developed within contexts inhabited by fragility – Nursing Homes for the elderly , by agony – the so call Hospice –, by the departments that receive cancer terminally ill patients and by those who are appointed to deal with them, the socio/health carers. In this sense, our interest has been primarily directed towards the communities strongly affected by situations of high distress or cognitive/physical downfall, settings that could reveal unexpected representations of life.In these places, the relationship between those receiving care and those giving it not only consists of sets of techniques acquired or to be acquired and their acceptance by the patient, but a space where listening, understanding, waiting, words, gestures and emotions compete in the definition of a reciprocal process of care.The sites of disease, as well as the places of death, paradoxically, are the spaces where we can humbly linger to listen to life itself. Wherever care, through its joint expression, can set itself against vulnerability, as a new condition, far from being just a powerful healing practice. If conceived in this way, treatment can also be seen as one possible form of human understanding, in which to develop a dialogue, a “Socratic thinking” between knowledge, skills, people and the countless performances that derive from.Studying the contexts of care and work practices (Wenger 2005) that permeate them, therefore, can not leave out a reworking by the researcher, the episteme of the same sickness and health (defined, respectively, as a temporary or chronic deficiency of the individual and the other as the absence of disease), and the research methodology the researcher chooses to follow has to address towards these questions. Especially in the field of health and illness, today, the social research tends to follow trajectories already set in advance by needs, or positions, no matter whether they provide for a socially useful outcome and the studies remain mainly oriented to the achievement of objectives statistically representative (in terms of correspondences between economic and social needs) or the construction of reflections on the effectiveness and efficiency of services. Polarities certainly important, but not enough, as we theorize