Day programs are commonly identified in dementia strategies as a solution for keeping people with dementia home for as long as possible. Limited research evidence is available to support these policy approaches, and much of what exists demonstrates equivocal results. While key day program researchers have called for improvements in methodological and theoretical efforts, we argue that basic assumptions concerning what a day program is, and how the effects of day programs should be studied, also require reconsideration. Problematization is a systematic review strategy used to identify and critique assumptions guiding research practices and knowledge development in a field of study. The approach entails a broad overview of a field of research alongside a close reading of key texts to identify prevailing assumptions about the object of study and how it can be known. The intent is to discern how these assumptions are influencing research practices and thus knowledge development. A review of historical texts and research literature reviews was used (1) to identify trends in day program research between 1990 and 2018 and (2) to support identification of influential and typical studies for closer analysis (n = 36). The outcome of our analysis of the research literature suggests three sets of assumptions that guide much of the day program research literature: dementia is mainly treated as a problem of the individual; day programs are treated as stand-alone units of substitute care; and the space of day programs is seen as a simple background to care. We argue that the assumptions regarding care and space have narrowed the field of research and contributed to the production of equivocal findings. We suggest alternative framings of notions of care and space, informed by a Science and Technology Studies’ approach to care practices, to generate knowledge about day programs that can usefully inform policy and practice.

Seeking to support qualitative researchers in the artful development of feminist care scholarship, our goal here is to ‘look back’ on how we have conceptualized the problems of care and developed research that illuminates the social organization of care in distinct ways. As part of a ‘feminist care scholar retrospective’, we present five condensed ‘reverse research proposals’, which are retrospective accounts of past research or scholarly activity. From there, we discuss how each project begins with a particular problematic for investigation and a particular conception of care (e.g., as practices, as work, as a concept) to illuminate facets of the social organization of care shaping paid and unpaid care work and its interpretations. These approaches reveal multiple and overlapping ways that care is embodied, understood and organized, as well as ways care can be transformed.

How are problems of family/friend care framed and politicized, and with what socio-political implications? This feminist rhetorical analysis examines how carers are positioned, how problems and solutions of care are framed, and how carers’ social and political rights are supported by Canadian caregiver organizations. Organizations’ public materials draw on and expand narratives that foreground individual risk and recognition, decentring the state’s role. We elaborate on how carers’ citizenship rights are discursively bounded with proposed individualized solutions that support them in continuing to care. Broader narratives could consider carers’ human or citizenship rights or otherwise foreground relationality and complex collective care solidarities.

Globally, day programs are increasingly proposed in policy as one way to address the support needs of people living at home with dementia and their families. Day programs represent a kind of space that can meet multiple interests and ideologies concerned with sustaining care at home for people living with dementia. In this paper, we draw on findings from an ethnographic study of how day programs work as care in the community for people living with dementia to argue that day programs’ ontological status in research as a “simple location” of care contributes to the ambiguous outcomes and limited evidence available for improving their design and delivery. Using one program as an illustrative case, we demonstrate the multiplicity of a day program and the ontological politics through which the potentialities for care emerge. Robert Cooper’s proximal analysis of organizing’s and Annemarie Mol’s work on ontological politics inform this analysis. Of note in this analysis are the different enactments of a day program and their modes of coordination. We show when these enactments hang together well and when they do not and consider the effects of these politics for care. Of particular concern is how some versions of a day program are easily displaced by the interests of administrative versions and managerial logics. We argue for approaches to research and planning that acknowledge the “day program multiple” and precarious nature of care.

There is a need for new imaginaries of care and social health for people living with dementia at home. Day programmes are one solution for care in the community that requires further theorisation to ensure an empirical base that is useful for guiding policy. In this article we contribute to the theorising of day programmes by using an ethnographic case study of one woman living with dementia at home using a day programme. Data were collected through observations, interviews and artefact analysis. Peg, whose case story is central in this article, was observed over a period of nine months for a total of 61 hours at the day programme, as well as 16 hours of observation at her home and during two community outings. We use a material semiotic approach to thinking about the day programme as a health ‘technology in practice’ to challenge the taken-for-granted ideas of day programmes as neutral, stable, bounded spaces. The case story of Peg is illustrative of how a day programme and its scripts come into relation with an arrangement of family care and life at home with dementia. At times the configuration of this arrangement works to provide a sort of stabilising distribution of care and space to allow Peg and her family to go on in the day-to-day life with dementia. At other times the arrangement creates limits to the care made possible. We argue that how we conceptualise and study day programmes and their relations to home and the broader care infrastructure matters to the possibilities of care they can enact.