| Popis: |
This book is an account of an ethnographic study designed to learn more about how families handle everyday life in the context of dementia, with the idea that if what families were already doing was better understood, their own efforts could be better supported. By following, and learning from, family arrangements for care, the question of what makes care for a family member living with dementia possible or impossible, easier or more difficult, is foregrounded. This question is also traced beyond the specific site of home to consider the ways that health and social care services and policy orientations are organized to support and/or hinder family arrangements. The book contributes to theorizing the intersections between what often seem unrelated: the formal care policies that articulate strategies to ‘manage’ populations of older people living with a diagnosis of dementia, the care practices of those at the frontlines who are responding to what often seem like overwhelming needs, and the care practices of families working to make everyday life liveable. The methodological approach and theoretical lens taken locates this work in a growing field of care practices research that is informed by the relational logic of material semiotics. This lens shifts the reader’s gaze from the isolated caregiver-care recipient dyad, and draws attention to the practical arrangements of bodies, objects, discourses, spaces and relations that constitute everyday living for persons living with dementia and their carers. |
