What does it mean to “care” for aging members of a community? How can a care facility balance being accessible to lower-income communities but still providing a high standard of treatment for the most vulnerable? And how do the answers to these questions become complicated when an eldercare facility is religiously affiliated? These puzzles are the basis of Dr. Angela Xia’s dissertation and upcoming book, as well as the subject of the postdoctoral candidate job talk she delivered in Leighton 304 on Tuesday, April 12.
Xia is currently serving as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame. She received her bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Columbia University and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, titled “The Rest of Life: Old Age and the Politics of Care in the United States, 1946–1981,” explored how religion and religious institutions have shaped what ethics look like in American healthcare, using eldercare as a case study.
Religion Professor Lori Pearson introduced Xia at the talk, describing Xia as a “scholar of religion and health in the United States” by highlighting her interests in religion and science, superstitions, religion and disability and the effects of embodied religious practices on healthcare. The talk was primarily attended by religion majors and faculty.
Xia began her talk by focusing on the word “care.” She said that the term is often used in many medical circles, including eldercare, but that it has many different meanings and frameworks depending on who is asked. The definition of “care” becomes even more complicated because it is also used in many religion and spirituality-based circles. Thus, when religion and healthcare converge in religious eldercare homes, “care” becomes a web of intersecting and often conflicting ideas.
In popular culture, conversations about eldercare are forced, fruitless or avoided altogether, Xia said. In the academic world, the development of hospitals and eldercare facilities — religious and nonreligious alike — are spoken about in a purely economic sense. Xia displayed a series of books about hospitals and care facilities published in recent decades, noting that all of them take a very market- and facility-centric approach rather than focusing on the people who run, staff and reside in them. Much of Xia’s lecture sought to interrupt this trend among both scholars and the wider public, and it was centered around the individual people and facilities that have shaped the way that eldercare has worked in the United States.
“Care is not just about talking; it is about doing, and it is not just about death, it is about life,” she said.
Much of Xia’s work focuses on how eldercare has evolved since World War II. She bases her research on care facility documents, advertising material and newspaper clippings. She noted that her research endeavors often lead her to strange places, as a number of care facilities did not keep up-to-date print information before the advent of electronic record-keeping. She recalled — and displayed an image of — a storage closet at a nursing home in California that she was allowed to search through.The home had not kept any print records because, as Xia was told, they were “too busy caring for people.”
Before the advent of Medicare in the 1960s, care homes were often run by any community organization that had the funds to maintain it. In many communities, religious institutions took on the task of caring for those who could no longer care for themselves. Xia explained how the labor was often taken on by women, and since the work had a religious bend to it, employees felt obligated to take on copious amounts of work and were frequently stretched thin.
Even after Medicare was passed and eldercare facilities were able to receive federal funding, debates over how those facilities were supposed to look continued. Xia shared a magazine advertisement for a series of Presbyterian eldercare homes that attempted to recreate the “homey” experience with a collection of smaller residences across neighborhoods rather than a large facility. Xia noted that the version of “home” these facilities sought to create was not the home environment that many of the residents had grown up in, as Social Security–subsidized homes primarily housed working-class people.
Xia shifted focus to the residents themselves, who she admitted did not have as large of a presence in archives compared to directors and staff of eldercare homes. She did, however, display a number of resident-created newsletters and magazines from both Jewish and Christian eldercare facilities, containing hand-drawn pictures and event itineraries. Xia said that even scholars often do not know whether the residents of religiously-affiliated care homes actually care about the religion of the facility, but she hopes their independence is reflected in their own writing and publications.
Xia is one of two postdoctoral fellow job candidates for the Religion department. The other candidate, Dr. Jeremy Steinberg, who is currently serving as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Kentucky, delivered a talk on Thursday, April 16 entitled “How did Ancient Greek literary concepts shape ancient Jewish ideas about the Bible?” If hired, Xia or Steinberg would be employed at Carleton for two years and teach classes while finishing their current book projects.
