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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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No substitute for human touch?
— Towards a critically posthumanist approach to dementia care | | Author(s) | Nicholas Jenkins |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 37, no 7, August 2017 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, August 2017 |
| Pages | pp 1484-1498 |
| Source | cambridge.org/aso |
| Keywords | Dementia ; Management [care] ; Humanism ; Citizenship. |
| Annotation | This paper develops a sociological critique of the pre-eminence of humanism in dementia care policy and practice. Throughout the centuries, humanism has served as something of a double-edged sword in relation to the care and treatment of people living with progressive neurocognitive conditions. On the one hand, humanism has provided an intellectual vehicle for recognising people with dementia as sentient beings with inalienable human rights. On the other hand, humanist approaches have relied upon and reinforced normative understandings of what it means to be human, understandings that serve to position people with dementia as deficient. Two posthumanist approaches to dementia care policy and practice are explored: transhumanism and critical posthumanism. The former seeks, primarily, to use advances in 21st-century technologies to eradicate dementia. The latter seeks to de-centre anthropomorphic interpretations of what it means to be a person with dementia, so as to create space for more diverse human-non-human relationships to emerge. The paper concludes with some tentative suggestions as to what a critically posthumanist approach to dementia care policy and practice might look like, as we move closer towards the middle of the 21st century. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-170721009 A |
| Classmark | EA: QA: TR6: IKC |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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