Petra Tamášová

Title of Project: Everyday politics of home-making for older women experiencing precarious housing or homelessness

Aim of Project: The aim of this project is threefold. First, to understand how social scientists can produce social ethnographies with precariously housed or homeless older women ethically, meaningfully, and harmlessly. Second aim is to describe complex and ambiguous relationships between home-less older women and different places they spend time at, use or create “home” from. Third question is how place- or home-making is connected to their everyday political acting.

Since 1970s, there was a long period of time of academy research and policies of „ageing in place“ understood, at first, as an ideal model for successful ageing – staying put in one’s own “home” as long as possible (Forsyth, Molinsky 2021). To understand the processes of ageing and the securing of well-being in place for groups without the possibility of ageing at (a typical) “home”, a critical perspective needs to be adopted that highlights the meanings, interpretations and experiences of ageing and late life (Grenier, 2021: 49). The aim of this ethnographic research in two of the largest cities in the Czech Republic – Brno and Prague – is to uncover the nature of the life experiences of a growing group of older women experiencing sub-standard housing conditions or homelessness.

Current state of research project:  Fieldwork in Prague, Czech Republic.