Critical and cultural perspectives on dementia

Research indicates that dementia has overtaken cancer as the condition that people most fear. The notion of dementia as both a terrifying illness and a significant societal threat is the result of a complex conjunction of events and forces—from demographic shifts to the impotency of global Pharma in the development of medical interventions.

This research Collection aims to bring together scholarship that thinks critically and creatively about dementia from new arts and humanities-based perspectives rather than more traditional quantitative, medical and scientific approaches including co-produced work with people living with dementia.

The Collection is organised around four main thematic strands:

• Time
• Place
• Intersectionality
• Ways of Knowing

We welcome contributions in a range of forms from the essay to conversations, provocations and creative pieces. We are also keen to publish work that explores these issues from a global south perspective.

This Collection aims to create a space for research from a range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives. This includes: arts practice, literary, film and cultural studies, history, politics, language and linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, sociology and fields such as dementia studies, cultural gerontology, aging studies, memory studies, the medical humanities, disability studies, arts for health and policy-making. The emphasis is on scholarship that engages critically and provocatively with dominant paradigms in dementia studies and popular perceptions of dementia in contemporary political and cultural discourse.

We encourage potential contributors to contact the editors with their ideas. Lucy Burke can be reached at L.Burke@mmu.ac.uk and Richard Ward can be reached at richard.ward1@stir.ac.uk.