Aging populations have been positioned as a challenge to health and social service planning around the world, a situation even more pronounced in the case of persons with a diagnosis of dementia. While policy responses emphasize that care be provided for persons with dementia in home settings for as long as possible and that family carers be supported in the provision of this care, finding good ways to support families as they do the work of 'delaying institutionalization' has been challenging despite decades of intervention research intended to develop and evaluate interventions to support families. In this context of limited effectiveness it is useful to examine the assumptions informing research practices. Problematization is a method of literature analysis useful for clarifying and challenging assumptions informing a field of research in order to generate new approaches to research or new research questions. Our analysis suggests that although community-based intervention research has contributed significant knowledge about the kinds of things that might help families, there are limitations related to the dominant assumptions underlying the field. We highlight three areas for re-consideration: the overriding focus on caregiver-care recipient dyads, the under-determination of the object(s) of inquiry and the algorithmic nature of interventions themselves. Issues in these areas, we argue, arise from a commitment to homogeneity characteristic of biomedical models of disease that may need to be rethought in the face of consequential heterogeneity among research populations. That is, there is a mismatch between 'dementia' in the intervention research literature and 'dementia' in the life that is consequential for families living with these concerns.

Over the last two decades significant efforts have been made to implement patient and family ‘centred’ care as both a practical and moral imperative for adult acute care delivery. Although many resources have been developed and adopted by institutions, research suggests persistent and diverse barriers to implementing and achieving patient and family ‘centred’ care in adult acute care practice settings. These issues in implementation suggest re‐examining the nature of ‘centredness’ in care may be useful. A structured problematisation method, as outlined by Alvesson and Sandberg, is utilised to identify and analyse assumptions about the central notions of ‘centring’ that inform patient and family centred care intervention research. From our analysis, we highlight three predominant areas within ‘centring’ intervention research that may benefit from rethinking: Vitruvian spatiality, democratising care, and ‘centring’ positioned as primarily a problem and accomplishment for nursing. As a challenge to these assumptions, we argue for the adoption of theoretical lenses that ‘de‐centre’ individual actors to better account for complex relations among multiple actors, both human and nonhuman, which work to involve patients and families in care practices.

The social health of people living with dementia is a more recent addition to the dementia research agenda; to date conceptions of the problem and solutions have relied on underdeveloped theorisations of sociality and social inclusion. In this article, using a material‐semiotic approach to care practices and infrastructure, we use an ethnographic case study of one family of a person living with dementia using a day programme and home care supports over a period of 9 months, to examine how infrastructural arrangements provide particular affordances for social relatedness for people living with dementia in the community. The aim of the analysis is to consider how the infrastructural affordances created by the organisation of care may create spatially bounded lives and limit the subject positions available for people living with dementia and their families. It is these narrowed positions of dwelling that we argue may be the necessary starting place for thinking about the social health of people living with dementia and the solutions that might be helpful for them.

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