In recent years there has been a growing interest in person-centred, 'living well' approaches to dementia, often taking the form of important efforts to engage people with dementia in a range of creative, arts-based interventions such as dance, drama, music, art and poetry. Such practices have been advanced as socially inclusive activities that help to affirm personhood and redress the biomedical focus on loss and deficit. However, in emphasizing more traditional forms of creativity associated with the arts, more mundane forms of creativity that emerge in everyday life have been overlooked, specifically with regard to how such creativity is used by people living with dementia and by their carers and family members as a way of negotiating changes in their everyday lives. In this paper, we propose a critical approach to understanding such forms of creativity in this context, comprised of six dimensions: everyday creativity; power relations; ways to operationalise creativity; sensory and affective experience; difference; and reciprocity. We point towards the potential of these dimensions to contribute to a reframing of debates around creativity and dementia.
A participatory film-making study carried out in long-term social care with 10 people with Alzheimer-type dementia found that places the participants had known early in life were spontaneously foregrounded. Participants' memories of such places were well-preserved, particularly when photo-elicitation techniques, using visual images as prompts, were employed. Consistent with previous work on the 'reminiscence bump' in dementia, the foregrounded memories belonged in all cases to the period of life between approximately 5 and 30 years. Frequently the remembered places were connected with major life events which continued to have a strong emotional component. The continuing significance of place in the context of long-term dementia care is considered from a psychogeographical perspective.
There is now widespread concern about the inadequate care and support provided to people with dementia from diagnosis to death. It is acknowledged that while there is a range of effective ways to care for and support people with dementia and their families from diagnosis to death, these have yet to become integral to practice. In England, for example, the National Dementia Strategy seeks to transform the quality of dementia care. One of the key components to transforming the quality of care is to ensure we have an informed and effective workforce. We argue here that in order to transform the quality of care we need to distinguish between the aims of training and education. Whilst there is a place for skills-based workplace training, Higher Education in dementia studies has a key role to play in the provision of specialist knowledge and skills in dementia care emphasizing as it does the development of critical thinking, reflection and action. In this paper we describe dementia studies at Bradford University available at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. We outline their aims and learning outcomes, curricula, approach to teaching, learning and assessment. We describe the nature of students who study with us, noting their fit with the Higher Education Funding Council in England's agenda for widening participation in higher education. Higher Education in dementia studies has a unique role to play in equipping practitioners and professionals with the information, skills and attitudes to realize the potential for quality of life for people with dementia and their families
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 20 th century, maintaining a stiff upper lip involved the ability to exert high levels of cognitive control over the subjective, visceral and emotional domains of experience. In the most common forms of dementia, which affect at least one in five men now in their 80s and 90s, this cognitive control is increasingly lost. One result is that, with the onset of dementia, men who have in the intervening years maintained a relative silence about their wartime experiences begin to disclose detailed memories of such events, in some cases for the first time. This article draws on narrative biographical data from three men with late-onset dementia who make extensive reference to their experience of war. The narratives of Sid, Leonard and Nelson are used to explore aspects of collective memory of the two World Wars, and the socially constructed masculinities imposed on men who grew up and came of age during those decades. The findings show that in spite of their difficulties with short term memory, people with dementia can contribute rich data to cultural studies research. Some aspects of the narratives discussed here may also be considered to work along the line of the counter-hegemonic, offering insights into lived experiences of war that have been elided in popular culture in the post-War years.Keywords: Dementia; masculinity; war; biography; narrative; popular culture. On the face of things this might suggest that our access to men's direct testimony of the war years is limited, not just by brute mortality, but also by age-related morbidity. Whilst diagnostic procedures differ between societies and cultures in ways that are beyond the scope of this article, it is recognised within most nations directly involved in or affected by WWII that many older survivors now experience a recognisable, age-related syndrome characterised by disturbance of memory (particularly short-term memory); generalised confusion (particularly in time and space) and problems with language that may be either expressive (for example word-finding problems) or receptive (difficulty in understanding others' speech). For purposes of the discussion below we will use the generic term dementia to describe this syndrome. __________________________________________________________________________1 This paper was originally prepared for an issue of this journal on 'Masculinities at war'. The much larger body of data from which the narratives discussed here are taken also includes many accounts of women's experiences of military service, civilian life in wartime, childhood evacuation and displacement. In this article we draw on the narratives of three men, Sid, Leonard and Nelson, to show that, despite their diagnosis, people with dementia can contribute rich data to cultural studies research. These data not only underscore arguments advance...
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