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Project

Re-membering "strange compositions": a visual anthropological inquiry with Flemish elderly with dementia into inclusive trajectories and rhizomatic narrativity.

 There is a space for people with dementia in contemporary society.  Their personhood in despite of the disease is recognized, the quality of care has considerably increased and we can relate to them by sharing stories: stories about who they once were, before the dementia.  Looking through a personhood lens, we re-member them: as the embodiment of a rich life story and as citizens of our community.  A person with dementia, however, apart from being a remnant of the past, is also an ageing body and a self in continuous transformation.  He or she is living through a radical change which experientially has no clear beginning, maybe only a clear end.  This change can lead to an apparent loss of meaning which the environment can only partially remediate. We have  become experts in keeping the past alive, but  are we equally comfortable with following the person in the present?  Does a personhood lens provide us with a space to receive life narratives and becomings which look strangely composed from the outside and don't appear to function at all?  Would we be willing to change the very way we write stories, the way we judge what works, and what doesn't and the ways we go along with the person (with dementia)?  This anthropological research brackets the personhood lens for a moment, to revisit this strangeness on an experiential level and follow people with dementia in their ongoing life narratives as inevitably included, and inevitably inscriptive, beyond recognition.

Date:1 Nov 2019 →  Today
Keywords:strange compositions, dementia, post-phenomenology, representationalism, personhood approach, participatory ethnography/analysis, rhizomatic narrativity
Disciplines:Anthropological theory, Medical anthropology, Social and cultural anthropology, Social gerontology and sociology of ageing, Feminist philosophy
Project type:PhD project