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Trento Regional Institute of Social Study and Research, Via S. Margherita 28, 38100, Trento, Italy
Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Via Verdi 26, 38100, Trento, Italy
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 14 March 2011
Accepted 14 March 2011
Keywords:
Place
Sensemaking
Widowhood
Situatedness
Emotional
Attachment
a b s t r a c t
The social sciences have recently shown a revival of interest in space and place. In this spatial
turn the place is seen as a place-in-process (Thrift, 2008) and as the emergent result of
constant re-involvement processes based on the continuous re-definition and re-construction
of its meaning. Moreover, elderly people's homes have acquired a renewed importance in the
wake of an aging in place strategy in social and health policies. This study describes the
processes of situatedness of place that occur during the widowhood. Involving ten older
widows, our analysis identies four distinct processes in the construction of the situated
meaning of a place: Heart displacement, The showcase of the self, Refuge and Introjection of
external spaces.
2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction1
In literature, the space is dened as an objectively
identiable context, while the place is described as a result
of subjective re-involvement processes characterized by
instability, mobility and continuous creativity. Researchers
have therefore begun to talk of the place-in-process, dened
in terms of its characteristics of dynamism and volatility,
which is less concerned with stability and more concerned
with movement, interactivity, and continuous birth (Thrift,
2008, p. 95). Shifting the attention from an idea of space as an
objective and emotional container to an idea of place-inprocess, we investigate the processes of social construction
activated by elderly women during the widowhood, a
signicant turning point that leads to the restructuring of
places within the home. Focusing our attention on the
processes by which the meaning of home is constructed
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These two centers for senior citizens and their social workers
were important in mediating the relationships between
researchers and the elderly involved. Within each center we
identied a case-manager who assumed the responsibility for
overseeing the ethical dimension of research. The case
manager has supported the researchers: in the statement of
research objectives, ensuring their understanding and sharing on a basis of transparency criteria; in the denition of
research methodologies appropriate to the characteristics of
the identied target; in the creation of the pact trust with the
elderly, which ranks as the warrantor of that agreement; in
the management of negative emotions experienced by some
participants in remembering the past.
The 10 informants ranged in age from 72 to 92 years.
We decided to involve widows in Italy they are ve times
more numerous than widowers (12.6% versus 2.4%) (ISTAT,
2009) who had decided to remain in the home that they had
shared with their partners, and who had lived alone for more
than ten years, so that widowhood was a recent phenomenon
and the processes of place signication had coalesced over time.
Four of the informants had worked only as housewives, while
six had had jobs outside the home. Five of them lived in
apartments of small size (around 50 m2), four in apartments of
70/80 m2, and only one in a detached house with a large garden.
The data were collected using the Cultural Probes methodology (Gaver, Dunne, & Pacenti, 2003), which lets the
participants narrate their own lives. We chose this relatively
non-invasive technique because it proves fruitful when the
researcher is initially unable to enter the domestic space subject
to study. The Cultural Probes method furnishes fragmentary
glimpses into the rich texture of people's lives (Gaver, Boucher,
Pennington, & Walker, 2004) and makes it possible to discover
and explain the way in which people themselves understand,
explicate, and manage daily situations. Cultural Probes consist
in a special kit of creative and provocative materials (Beyer &
Holtzblatt, 1998; Hemmings, Crabtree, Rodden, Clarke, &
Rounceeld, 2002) that let the participants narrate their lives.
As some researchers (Gaver et al., 2004) have noted, the probes
are often fragmentary and ambiguous. However, they can be a
resource with which to investigate the subjective accounts that
people give about material that they have produced, and they
should be considered also a resource for the cooperative
analysis of data. Our kit was designed in function of our
research question, and it consisted in the following selfexpression tools:
Pen and paper, with which to draw maps of the homes, and
adhesive labels to describe the emotional and functional
nature of the various places in the home. We included labels
referring to daily activities e.g., the place where I meet
friends feelings e.g., the place where I feel safe and
metaphors e.g., the heart of home. Participants were
also asked to draw relevant objects, artifacts and technologies on the map. We expected this information to
contribute to our understanding of how older adults
organize and give meaning to the domestic space, and of
the relationship between objects and activities.
A camera, with which to take pictures of the home and its
spaces, to be used as additional descriptions of the home
and the objects it contains, enabling comparisons with the
information provided by the maps.
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Heart displacement
Heart displacement was one of the principal processes
that occurred upon widowhood. When the spouse was still
alive and the household was still united, the center of the
home coincided with its heart, i.e. with the place where the
members of the family gathered together. It therefore
assumed a strong emotional-affective value, as testied by
Giulia2:
Here, around this table, on these benches, we gathered so
many times, thirteen fourteen of us. Together with the
table and the benches we also got that little bell over there,
and now when people come to visit me, they ring it.
During widowhood, this meaning system was re-elaborated
in nostalgic and situated terms within a dimension of memory.
The center of the home assumed a new meaning and came to
coincide with the place for performance of the activities and
routines ensuring control over the organization of everyday
life. Thus, the center of the home changed from its heart to a
control center.
We found that the heart displacement process usually
made the center of the home coincide with the kitchen. The
latter was represented and described as a multifunctional
place where heterogeneous activities took place: social
activities such as receiving family members; or coordinative
activities, which implied the use of calendars and memos as
reminders of tasks and deadlines. The other core activities
undertaken in the kitchen were cooking and eating; these
regulated the other activities of the day, organizing their
times. They therefore help in understanding as to why the
kitchen might be described as a coordination center. For
Tina, the kitchen once the heart of the home she said
with the advent of widowhood assumed a new meaning also
manifest in a spatialorganizational change. It was within the
kitchen that new technological artifacts were introduced.
Often gifts from the children, these artifacts were useful in
supporting the women's memories calendars, memos or
2
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230
three primrose plants. Last year, same day, same month, I paid
fty cents apiece. This year instead eighty-nine cents.
However, Franca was not the only interviewee to invest in
the activity of caring for owers. Although Lorena had only a
very small apartment, this had not prevented her from
creating a small garden on her kitchen windowsill. But she
could only have cut owers in vases instead of potted plants.
During our visits for interviews she explained how she cared
for them:
I want them to last as long as possible. So I change the
water very often, if it's very hot I put in a chunk of ice, cut
the stems at a slant, one bit at a time. Someone told me to
add half an aspirin to the fresh water, is that right?
Nor did the small size of her home prevent her from
engaging in particularly enjoyable activities:
I always buy primroses as soon as the rst ones arrive in
February. I immediately transplant them with all their
roots into a box with some soil. There are three of them in
my box. If it isn't too cold I put them in front of the French
window and enjoy them for the whole of their owering.
Also the garden and the vegetable plot were lived as part
of the home. These places were emotionally connoted
because they had plants and owers with which affective
relationships were established through tender care-giving.
Iole, for instance, considered herself fortunate that her
neighbors let her take care of their small plot of land. Without
children, Iole had suffered greatly from loneliness after the
death of her husband, and the garden had become the place
to which she could devote her energies. She spent almost the
entire afternoon in her small vegetable plot, especially in
summer when she could gather the fruits of her labors, like
courgettes and green beans.
From the participants' stories it emerged that they had
established strong emotional relationships not only with the
plants and owers that they cared for, but also with all the
natural elements with which they came into contact. They
made frequent references to the seasons, the climate and the
weather. Apparently banal instruments like a thermometer or
barometer acquired emotional connotations from their ability
to create a bond with nature. Every morning, before going
out, I look through the window and when the sky is gray my
mood becomes gray too. So I check my little meteorological
station composed by thermometer or barometer (Franca).
Moreover, the interviewees very frequently described the
view from the windows of their homes as crucial: the
presence or absence of a view of the mountains or other
natural landscapes, in fact, performed a key role in their
psychological well-being because it inuenced their moods.
Concluding discussion
Our aim in this paper has been to analyze the re-denition
of space and place that occurs in aging and as it often
happens after the partner's death. We have shown that the
widows behaved as meaning-makers and constructed invisible boundaries that delimited different places within their
homes. These boundaries were perceived, constructed and
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