Transferring from wheelchair to bed: (Re)subjectifying and partner-positioning a person with late-stage dementia in the care task

Assisting people into bed is in many ways centered around the person’s body—it is the body that needs to be moved and laid down. As a result, the body’s material and tangible properties—the body as an object—are foregrounded. This study demonstrates, however, how care workers, when assisting a person with late-stage dementia into bed, maintain a balance between handling the body of the care-recipient as an object of care and including the person as a co-participant in the activity, highlighting the participatory role of the person, and thus positioning the care-recipient as a partner in the activity of the transfer. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis, and presenting two cases of transfer, the study shows that the activity of moving into bed is usually organized into three consecutive sequences of (a) preparing the move, (b) transfer proper, and (c) adjusting the resident in bed. In every phase of the activity, caregivers, through careful and coordinated embodied and verbal interactions, manage the care-recipient not only as an object of care and her body as an objective body but also as a lived body, highlighting the agentive and subjective aspects of the resident’s personhood. The results of the study point to care workers’ skillful handling of interactional resources to deal with the social sensitivity of moving assistance-dependent residents to their bed through partner-positioning the resident, and thus (re)subjectifying the person with late-stage dementia despite the objectifying aspects of the transfer.