Main description:

This book puts the critical into dementia studies. It makes a timely and novel contribution to the field, offering a thought-provoking critique of current thinking and debate on dementia. Collectively the contributions gathered together in this text make a powerful case for a more politically engaged and critical treatment of dementia and the systems and structures that currently govern and frame it.

The book is inter-disciplinary and draws together leading dementia scholars alongside dementia activists from around the world. It frames dementia as first and foremost a political category. The book advances both theoretical and methodological thinking in the field as well as sharing learning from empirical research. Outlining the limits to existing efforts to frame and theorise the condition, it proposes a new critical movement for the field of dementia studies and practice.

The book will be of direct interest to researchers and scholars in the field of dementia studies and wider fields of health, disability and care. It will provide a novel resource for students and practitioners in the fields of dementia, health care and social care. The book also has implications for dementia policymaking, commissioning and community development.

Contents:

Introduction: Why critical dementia studies and why now?

Part I: Reclaiming and recasting

1. I want to be the orchestrator of my entire fabulous life

2. Small quantities at a time: On music, poetry and social media

3. Who knew a pothole could bring it all back?

4. Nobody is allowed to offend us - not by language, nor by attitude

5. Recognizing Birkby: Living and caring with dementia

Part II: Re/framing

6. 'Lost in time like tears in rain': Critical Perspectives on Personhood and Dementia

7. Multi-Species Dementia Studies: How moving beyond human exceptionalism can advance dementia's more critical turn

8. Reframing 'ethnicity' in dementia research: Reflections on current whiteness of research and the need for an anti-racist approach

9. Frames of Dementia, grieving otherwise in The Father, Relic and Supernova: Representing dementia in recent film

Part III: Care and control

10. Precarity and Dementia

11. An Emerging Necropolitics of the Dementias

12. Segregation and Incarceration of People Living with Dementia in Care Homes: Critical Disability and Human Rights Approaches

13. The carnival is not over: cultural resistance in dementia care environments

Part IV: Forging alliances

14. Convergences, Collaborations, and Co-conspirators: The Radical Potentiality of Critical Disability Studies and Critical Dementia Studies

15. Thinking dementia differently: Dialogues between feminist scholarship and dementia studies

16. Revolutionising dementia policy and practice: Guidance from 'the memory girl', an accomplice

17. Taking a Queer Turn - the significance of Queer Theory for Critical Dementia Studies

18. Neurodiversity and dementia: Pitfalls, possibilities and some personal notes

19. Thinking back and looking ahead: Co-ordinates for critical methodologies in dementia studies