Main description:

A groundbreaking exploration of the sociology of dementia with contributions from distinguished international scholars and practitioners. * Organised around the four themes of personhood, care, social representations and social differentiation * Provides a critical look at dementia and demonstrates how sociology and other disciplines can help us understand its social context as well as the challenges it poses * Contributing authors explore the social terrain, responding in part, to Paul Higgs and Chris Gilleard s highly influential work on ageing * Breaks new ground in giving specific attention to the social and cultural dimensions of responses to dementia

Contents:

Introduction: Ageing, dementia and the social mind: past, present and future perspectives (Paul Higgs and Chris Gilleard) 1. Relational citizenship: supporting embodied selfhood and relationality in dementia care (Pia Kontos, Karen-Lee Miller and Alexis P. Kontos) 2. Shifting dementia discourses from deficit to active citizenship (Linda Birt, Fiona Poland, Emese Csipke and Georgina Charlesworth) 3. Narrative collisions, sociocultural pressures and dementia: the relational basis of personhood reconsidered (Edward Tolhurst, Bernhard Weicht and Paul Kingston) 4. Power, empowerment, and person-centred care: using ethnography to examine the everyday practice of unregistered dementia care staff (Kezia Scales, Simon Bailey, Joanne Middleton and Justine Schneider) 5. Institutionalising senile dementia in 19th-century Britain (Emily Stella Andrews) 6. Dichotomising dementia: is there another way? (Patricia McParland, Fiona Kelly and Anthea Innes) 7. When walking becomes wandering: representing the fear of the fourth age (Katherine Brittain, Cathrine Degnen, Grant Gibson, Claire Dickinson and Louise Robinson) 8. Re-imagining dementia in the fourth age: the ironic fictions of Alice Munro (Marlene Goldman) 9. Social class, dementia and the fourth age (Ian Rees Jones) 10. Precarity in late life: rethinking dementia as a frailed old age (Amanda Grenier, Liz Lloyd and Chris Phillipson) Index