Dementia and Culture

9 items

Posted: April 18, 2023

Critical dementia studies: An introduction

Richard Ward + Linn Sandberg

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… Read more »

Posted: November 22, 2021

The Neuropsychiatric Biopolitics of Dementia and its Ethnicity Problem

Maria Zubair

Abstract Sociological analyses of dementia have long drawn on critiques of medicalisation and the medical model. This approach fails to account for late 20th/early 21st century expansion of neuropsychiatric biopolitics, wherein a more subtle and pervasive (self-)governance of health, illness, and life itself is at stake. Since the 1970s, new neuropsychiatric imaginings of dementia have… Read more »

Posted: November 22, 2021

Positioning ethnicity in dementia awareness research: does the use of senility risk ascribing racialised knowledge deficits to minority groups?

Abstract Over recent decades, the importance of increasing dementia awareness has been promoted by charities, researchers and governments. In response, a large body of research has emerged that evaluates the awareness of different populations. One such population are minority ethnic communities. Associated studies typically conclude that minority ethnic groups have a poor awareness of dementia… Read more »

Posted: April 28, 2021

“I was the Woman, he was the Man”: dementia, recognition, recognisability and gendered subjectivity

Linn Sandberg
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Subjectivity is a widely explored topic in dementia studies, in both the humanities and the social sciences. Persistent discourses of “a loss of self” in dementia have been challenged by scholars, who argue for the need for continued recognition of the person with dementia and that subjectivity in dementia may be sustained. So far, however,… Read more »

file_downloadI was the Woman, he was the Man
Posted: May 27, 2020

Dementia and the Paradigm of the Camp: Thinking Beyond Giorgio Agamben’s Concept of “Bare Life”

Lucy Burke

This essay discusses the use of analogies drawn from the Holocaust in cultural representations and critical scholarship on dementia. The paper starts with a discussion of references to the death camp in cultural narratives about dementia, specifically Annie Ernaux’s account of her mother’s dementia in I Remain in Darkness. It goes on to develop a… Read more »

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Posted: September 30, 2019

The carnival is not over Cultural resistance in dementia care

Andrea Capstick

Within the still-dominant medical discourse on dementia, disorders of language feature prominently among diagnostic criteria. In this view, changes in ability to produce or understand coherent speech are considered to be an inevitable result of neuropathology. The carnival is not over: Cultural resistance in dementia care, Andrea Capstick and John Chatwin, Pragmatics and Society, Volume… Read more »

Posted: September 30, 2019

Challenging representations of dementia in contemporary Western fiction film

Andrea Capstick

Fiction film is one of the most influential vehicles for the popularization of dementia. It is likely to have a particular influence on the way dementia is constructed by society at large, not least due to its consumption in the guise of entertainment. Challenging representations of dementia in contemporary Western fiction film: From epistemic injustice… Read more »

Posted: September 30, 2019

Behind the Stiff Upper Lip: War Narratives of Older Men with Dementia

Andrea Capstick

The concept of the stiff upper lip stands as a cultural metaphor for the repression and figurative ‘biting back’ of traumatic experience, particularly in military contexts. For men born in the first half of the twentieth century, maintaining a stiff upper lip involved the ability to exert high levels of cognitive control over the subjective,… Read more »