"I feel like a caged pig in here." The Role of Ethnicity in a Nursing Home.

Abstract: Racial disparities in nursing home (NH) quality of life (QOL) are well established, yet, little is understood about actual experiences shaping QOL for Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) residents in NHs. This gap extends to BIPOC residents with limited English proficiency (LEP). 

Drawing on Kane's (2001) and Zubristky's (2013) QOL frameworks, this case study examined QOL experiences for Hmong NH residents, an ethnic and refugee group from Southeast Asia, in a NH with a high proportion of BIPOC residents. Methods include four months of observation, interviews with eight Hmong residents and five NH staff, and one community focus group. Thematic analysis revealed significant challenges in QOL. Exacerbated by language barriers and racism, many residents reported neglect, limited relationships, lack of meaningful activities, and dissatisfaction with food. These experiences fostered a sense of resignation and diminished QOL among Hmong residents, highlighting the need for additional supports for this group. (See Thao, Davilla & Shippee, 2024)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

- See Thao, M., Davilla, H., Shippee, T. (2024).  "I feel like a caged pig in here": Language, Race, and Ethnic Identity in a Case Study Hmong Nursing Home Resident Quality of Life. Journal of Applied Gerontology, link

- photograph by Flip Schulke via

Safety in Housing for Older Adults

Abstract: Housing solutions for older adults aim at providing a safe environment to live in. The construction is heavily based on aspects of physical safety, often disregarding the social aspects of feeling safe. The older adults themselves are looking for a living environment that supports their individual capacities and social networks. 

The living environment can contribute to their physical, social, and emotional safety by providing accessible housing and spaces for community building. Interviews with older adults who had recently lived through a building fire highlighted the importance of the community in daily life, in emergency as well as in recovery from hazards. The results show that community building is related to access to common-use spaces and daily interaction with neighbors. The shared spaces in the immediate surroundings can enhance community cohesion and generate peer support. The common-use spaces and public facilities in urban environment have a significant role in emergencies and in the process of recovery from adversities. (Verma, 2024)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

- Verma, I. (2024). Safety in Housing for Older Adults - A Qualitative Study. Journal of Applied Gerontology, link

- photograph by Flip Schulke via

The Lavender Scare

The Red Scare, the witch-hunt against Communists during the Cold War, was accompanied by what was later dubbed the Lavender Scare. In 1947, the U.S. Park Police launched the so-called "Sex Perversion Elimination Program" targeting gay men. The following year, an act was passed that facilitated the arrest and punishment of "sexual psychopaths". Homosexuality was seen as a subversive threat, just like Communism. In 1950, Senator McCarty directly linked Communism and homosexuality. In his speech, he claimed to have a list of 205 Communists working at the State Department. McCarthy went into details about some individuals who he branded as "unsafe risks"  Two cases, "Case 14" and "Case 62" concerned homosexuality.  

According to a top intelligence official, so McCarthy, "practically every active Communist is twisted mentally or physically in some way". That included the two cases he had mentioned since homosexuals were susceptible to Communist recruitment due to their "peculiar mental twists". One week later it was reported that 91 homosexual employees of the State Department had been dismissed for the sake of national security. Political rhetoric was more and more characterised by linking "Communists and queers", assumptions about Communists were mirrored beliefs about homosexuals. What they were said to have in common was that both groups were: morally weak, godless, psychologically disturbed, undermining the tranditional family, shadowy figures with secret subcultures. From the 1940s to the 1960s, thousands of gay employees were fired from the federal workforce (via).

In 2023, on the 70th anniversary of the Lavender Scare, the White House published a statement calling the decades-long period of investigation, interrogation and firing of up to 10,000 queer Federal employees one of the darkest chapters in US-American history (via).

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
photograph (John Paul Evan's photograph of his own marriage) via

Inspiration Porn

The term "inspiration porn" was coined by disability rights activist Stella Young (1982-2014) in 2012. Here are some excerpts from her TEDx talk in which she explains why disabled people are no objects of inspiration, no objects at all.

I grew up in a very small country town in Victoria. I had a very normal, low-key kind of upbringing. I went to school, I hung out with my friends, I fought with my younger sisters. It was all very normal. And when I was 15, a member of my local community approached my parents and wanted to nominate me for a community achievement award. And my parents said, "Hm, that's really nice, but there's kind of one glaring problem with that. She hasn't actually achieved anything." 

 And they were right, you know. I went to school, I got good marks, I had a very low-key after school job in my mum's hairdressing salon, and I spent a lot of time watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek." Yeah, I know. What a contradiction. But they were right, you know. I wasn't doing anything that was out of the ordinary at all. I wasn't doing anything that could be considered an achievement if you took disability out of the equation. Years later, I was on my second teaching round in a Melbourne high school, and I was about 20 minutes into a year 11 legal studies class when this boy put up his hand and said, "Hey miss, when are you going to start doing your speech?" And I said, "What speech?" You know, I'd been talking them about defamation law for a good 20 minutes. And he said, "You know, like, your motivational speaking. You know, when people in wheelchairs come to school, they usually say, like, inspirational stuff?" "It's usually in the big hall." 

And that's when it dawned on me: This kid had only ever experienced disabled people as objects of inspiration. We are not, to this kid -- and it's not his fault, I mean, that's true for many of us. For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers or our doctors or our manicurists. We're not real people. We are there to inspire. And in fact, I am sitting on this stage looking like I do in this wheelchair, and you are probably kind of expecting me to inspire you. Right? Yeah.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you dramatically. I am not here to inspire you. I am here to tell you that we have been lied to about disability. Yeah, we've been sold the lie that disability is a Bad Thing, capital B, capital T. It's a bad thing, and to live with a disability makes you exceptional. It's not a bad thing, and it doesn't make you exceptional. 

And in the past few years, we've been able to propagate this lie even further via social media. You may have seen images like this one: "The only disability in life is a bad attitude." Or this one: "Your excuse is invalid." Indeed. Or this one: "Before you quit, try!" These are just a couple of examples, but there are a lot of these images out there. You know, you might have seen the one, the little girl with no hands drawing a picture with a pencil held in her mouth. You might have seen a child running on carbon fiber prosthetic legs. And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn.  And I use the term porn deliberately, because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. So in this case, we're objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, "Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person."

But what if you are that person? I've lost count of the number of times that I've been approached by strangers wanting to tell me that they think I'm brave or inspirational, and this was long before my work had any kind of public profile. They were just kind of congratulating me for managing to get up in the morning and remember my own name.  And it is objectifying. These images, those images objectify disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. They are there so that you can look at them and think that things aren't so bad for you, to put your worries into perspective. 

And life as a disabled person is actually somewhat difficult. We do overcome some things. But the things that we're overcoming are not the things that you think they are. They are not things to do with our bodies. I use the term "disabled people" quite deliberately, because I subscribe to what's called the social model of disability, which tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses.  

(...) 

I really think that this lie that we've been sold about disability is the greatest injustice. It makes life hard for us. And that quote, "The only disability in life is a bad attitude," the reason that that's bullshit is because it's just not true, because of the social model of disability. No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. Never. Smiling at a television screen isn't going to make closed captions appear for people who are deaf. No amount of standing in the middle of a bookshop and radiating a positive attitude is going to turn all those books into braille. It's just not going to happen. 

I really want to live in a world where disability is not the exception, but the norm. I want to live in a world where a 15-year-old girl sitting in her bedroom watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" isn't referred to as achieving anything because she's doing it sitting down. I want to live in a world where we don't have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning. I want to live in a world where we value genuine achievement for disabled people, and I want to live in a world where a kid in year 11 in a Melbourne high school is not one bit surprised that his new teacher is a wheelchair user. 

Disability doesn't make you exceptional, but questioning what you think you know about it does.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

photograph (Isle of Wight Festival) via

Can I Keep My Job? Adult Children Caring for their Elderly Parents

In the 1970s, studies started showing to what extent public services can support parents when it comes to combining caring for their children with participation in employment. Only in the 1990s did researchers begin to focus on the impact adult children's caring for their elderly parents can have on their participation in the labour market. According to research, the need (or wish) to care for older parents can lead to adult children losing their jobs, more absence from work, increased use of part-time work or more difficulty concentrating at work (due to being worried) and negative effects on productivity, promotion and salary.

Adult children are important care providers, most of the non-professional care is provided by daughters of older people. In other words, a great many women "in their fifties and sixties are now both working and having to care for their parents", hence "more likely than men to withdraw completely from the labour market" or work fewer hours - either because they need the time to care for the parent(s) or because of health problems resulting from attempts to combine care work with job. "Public expenditures on eldercare appear to affect both intergenerational support and female labour market participation."

Gautun and Brett (2017) investigated the connection between adult children's attendance at work and public care services for older people. 

We test the hypothesis that the detrimental effect on attendance at work of having an older parent in need of care is moderated (reduced) by the parent’s use of a public nursing homes, possibly also by home care services.

The study was carried out in Norway (n = 529, employees aged 45 to 65). A majority of respondents (80%) had provided support to their parent(s) in mostly practical form, e.g. purchases or transportation. 16% ha given nursing assistance. 58% of those reporting to have helped their parent(s) during the past year said that it was difficult to combine care and work. 

The results are interesting and probably not extremely surprising:

Institutional care for older people in need of care (i.e. nursing homes) was associated with improved work attendance among their children—their daughters in particular. Data also indicated a moderating effect: the link between the parents’ reduced health and reduced work attendance among the children was weaker if the parent lived in a nursing home. However, the results were very different for home-based care: data indicated no positive effects on adult children’s work attendance when parents received non-institutionalised care of this kind. Overall, the results suggest that extending public care service to older people can improve their children’s ability to combine work with care for parents. However, this effect seems to require the high level of care commonly provided by nursing homes. Thus, the current trend towards de-institutionalising care in Europe (and Norway in particular) might hamper work attendance among care-giving adult children, women in particular. Home care services to older people probably need to be extended if they are intended as a real alternative to institutional care.

- - - - - - - - - - -

- Gautun, H. & Brett, C. (2017). Caring too much? Lack of public services to older people reduces attendance at work among their children. European Journal of Ageing, 14, 155-166,, link
- photograph by Dorothea Lange (1938) via

Quoting Betty Friedan

"Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength."

Betty Friedan

photograph of Betty Friedan via

It's not ...

“It’s not how old you are. It’s how you are old.”

Jules Renard

photograph by Harold Feinstein via

Bringing The Struggle Into Focus. By Peter McKenzie.

"We are people before we're photographers."

Duane Michael

"I am part of all that I have touched and that has touched me."

Thomas Wolfe

This is the basic promise that this paper will follow. I believe that if we are going to become part of the struggle through photographic communication we must examine and realise the undeniable responsibility of all photographers in South Africa to using the medium to establish a democratic Azania. Our photographic seeing is the direct result of the factors that contribute to our being here. Our day to day experiences and our degree of sensitivity to these will determine the are we isolate in our viewfinder, the moment in time that we freeze forever.

Photographic Communication and Culture

"Your child shares in your sense of indignity when you are stopped outside your yard and asked to produce your reference book. Your child shares in your sense of outrage and anger when people arrive in your house in the midle of th (sic) night and take you away, throw you into jail without trial, and for weeks, evven months, refuse your wife the right to see you.

As their cars drive off into the night with you, they leave behind seeds of hatred in the hearts of your small kids."

Percy Qoboza

This "way of seeing" referred to in the introduction, holds true for the viewer too. We therefore realize the importance of examining this relationship with our viewers so that they can understand, interpret and perceive the images that we transmit to them in the process of communication. Culture supplies this relationship. To demonstrate this we can compare photographic comunication to an iceberg where the tip of the iceberg represents the point and the submerge area the unstated unconscous cultural assumptions that make communications possible. Communication depends on the assumption that photographer and viewer share a common culture. 

Photographic communication is possible in our multicultural society because we are united under oppression. The chances of being morally affected by photographs is better than ever before in our struggle because of the level of consciousness and awareness of the people. Evidences of the last drawing together of the laager are so evident tha tthose who don't see them are those who choose to ignore them!

Because of the high level of awareness and frequent acts of resistance in this country we will regard our culture at this stage in our struggle as a resistance culture. (...)

The poor history of committed photography in South Africa will reflect the refusal of most photographers to accept their responsibility to participate in the struggle.

"Whether he likes it or not the photographer is in the business of communication and it is useless to retreat into the romanticism of self-expression and technology wizardy. Useless, because to communicate takes us purely beyond personal and technical concerns and into phenomena that the communicator and his audiences share."

Frank Webster

This shows the added responsibility of photographers in South Africa as oppression continually stifles the inherent creativity in us. No photographer can lay claim to any individual artistic merit in an oppressed society.

We must realize at this urgent stage of our struggle the importance of making a commitment to change through photographic communication. 

Once we realize the importance of our resistance culture in photographic communication it becomes clear that we can successfully communicate on a level that the people are perceptive to. 

(...)

Effects of uniqueness on photographic communication

Once we've understood the present feelings and sensitivities of our intended viewers we can become explicit and direct in our photographhic communication and the statements we make will be easily understood.

Lewis hine, a pioneer in social documentation, said: "There are two things I wanted to do with the camera, I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected, I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated." Social documentation can be regarded as having two aspects, negative aspects which we can call negative documentation and positive aspects or positive documentation. 

Negative documentation

This type of documentation is to show the effects of injustice. They show the shocking conditions that people are forced to cope with, they show the faces of those who have given up in the face of overwhelming odds. These images are meant to awaken the sleeping consciences of those who havent't yet realized their oppression and the danger of non-commitment to change. There are those of our brothers who are so blinded by crumbs from the master's table, who even develop a sense of pride over their false securities. Because of the realistic tangibility of photographs they can arrest the conscienne of those people and influence them into remedial action.

Positive documentation

We can see the danger of negative documentation. We could be seen as a pathetic and hopeless people. Nothing could be more misleading, our struggle has shown resolution, dignity and strength. We've got to show the hope and determination of all committed to freeom. 

The photographer must serve the needs of the struggle. He must share the day eperiences of the people in order to communicate truthfully. We must be invovled in the strikes, riots, boycotts, festivities, church activities and occurrences that affect our day to day living. We must identify with our subjects in order for our viewers to identify with them. Because of the realistice nature of photographs and the relationships built up around the camer and its images they can promote unity, increase awareness and inform. A society possessing these qualities is an easily mobilized one. We as photographers must also be questioning, socially consious and more aware than our predecessors. 

(...)

Two intentions are necessary for committed photography in South Africa:

1. We must be comitted to liberation.

2. We must prepare our people for a democratic Azania. 

Peter McKenzie, Botswana Cultural Festival, Gaborone, 1982

- - - - - - - - - -

photograph by Ernest Cole via

The Afrapix Collective

Afrapix was founded in South Africa in 1982 (and disbanded in 1991), a collective of photographers who documented and opposed Apartheid. According to Paul Weinberg, a cofounder, initially, there were two objectives: to found a cooperative not unlike Magnum Photos but also - or primarily - to stimulate social documentary photography and social change.

(...) the Afrapix photographers’ mandate was to be participants in action, aligned with the politics and principles of the anti-apartheid movement. Their work was grounded in the belief that exposure and visibility were not the end goal; rather, the objective was ‘preconditions for an empathetic and humanistic reaction that would prompt international political action.’ (via)

The more influential Afrapix became, the more challenges the photographers had to face. Apartheid security forces harrassed the photographers, their office was raided, then the building (which also housed other anti-apartheid groups) was bombed. There were police surveillance, spies, and direct threats. Laws became more restrictive, designed to fight "the public relations nightmare the apartheid government was experiencing overseas, namely, images of white police officers brutalising unarmed black civilians". The mainstream press avoided running stories that seemed to be opposing the government policy and censored itself to survive since their revenue came from the white readership that was already complaining about boring and annoying headlines "about the experiences of Black South Africans". These experiences were not appealing to advertisers, either (via).

- - - - - - - - - - -

photograph (COSATU Cultural Day 1987, (c) Anna Zieminski) via

Trabold, Bryan. 2018. Rhetorics of Resistance: Opposition Journalism in Apartheid South Africa. 23. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh.

Trabold, Bryan. 2018. Rhetorics of Resistance: Opposition Journalism in Apartheid South Africa. 43. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh.

Trabold, Bryan. 2018. Rhetorics of Resistance: Opposition Journalism in Apartheid South Africa. 43. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh.