Paper short abstract:

My paper explores what kind of subjects/persons/selves emerge in the entanglement of political, public health, bio-medical, social, institutional, interpersonal and interspecies relations in the liminal space between life and death during Animal-Assisted Therapy in institutionalized dementia care.

Paper long abstract:

Medical and public health narratives of dementia are dominated by ideas of erosion and loss of personhood, cognitive abilities, self-awareness and agency. People with dementia are portrayed as living in liminal zones between living and dying (Kaufman 2006; 2015), challenging the differentiation between life/death, body/mind, person/non-person. In this debate, personhood, though occupying a central role, remains heavily associated with human exceptionalism. I propose an exploration of sociality in both dementia and human-animal relations, by following two paths. The first, critiquing the Western philosophical tradition of personhood, alongside the medical hegemony of blurrily diagnosed dementia, using conceptualisations of personhood both anthropological (dividual personhood; porous subjects), and care-based (relational citizenship; embodied knowledge and agency; intercorporeal personhood). The second, explores the interspecies relations that takes place in the complex system of contact zones (Haraway 2008) between people with dementia, relatives, medical staff, therapy dogs, volunteers, trainers, and veterinarians. Using ethnographic data, I explore the entanglement of political, public health, bio-medical, social, institutional, interpersonal and interspecies relations that become interlaced through Animal-Assisted Therapy in the liminal space of dementia between life and death, human and animal interaction. I explore what subject/self/person types emerge, shaped by new opportunities of being and becoming with each other. Finally, I explore how a multi-species moral community might alter knowledge about dementia and redefine the status that non-human animals play in the wider medical, public health and social community, targeting 'marginal' relations as potentially challenging hegemonic assumptions about what it means to be alive, human or animal.