Symposium: Taking a critical turn in dementia studies

Abstract

In many respects, the so-called dementia community has arrived rather belatedly at a debate on rights and citizenship in relation to dementia. Only recently have we begun to witness the emergence of policy and analysis where questions concerning rights, equality and social participation are being explicitly addressed. In this context, much can potentially be learned from the earlier campaigns for equality and the critical response they have subsequently engendered. Indeed, it might be argued that a more critical level or layer of analysis is largely missing from the field of dementia studies that only becomes clear when we draw comparisons to these other struggles for emancipation. It is this gap, or critical silence, in the field of dementia studies that we wish to consider in this symposium. Our intention is to make the case for a more radical critique of the social construction, conditions and politics of dementia. The papers in this symposium represent an effort to open up a critical space to reflect upon the positioning of people with dementia as part of a wider social, historical and cultural response to debility in later life. This wider context provides the basis to examine a discourse that remains saturated with a medicalised logic of individual deficit, and is increasingly cast in a binary relationship to notions of ‘healthy ageing’ and to an unspecified and unmarked norm of ‘able-mindedness’. We are interested in the ways that particular discourses surrounding dementia have closed down or circumvented ‘alternative realities’. How, for example has the recent struggle for acceptance and inclusion driven by a neoliberal politics of normalisation overshadowed a politics of ‘anti-normalisation’ that has previously marked the emergence of queer studies, radical feminism and crip/critical disability studies, all of which have evolved at the margins of an increasingly mainstream discourse of rights and recognition? This symposium is then a first step toward a more critical approach within dementia studies and will stake out new territory for the field while illustrating the benefits of learning from other radical and critical movements.