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Paper short abstract

This paper explores interpersonal and interspecies atmospheres in ethnographic fieldworks from private homes, day centers and nursing homes in Denmark arguing that attention to atmospheres can help articulate neuro-diverse, species-diverse and world-open accounts of generative dementia socialities.

Paper long abstract

A deer stares out from the computer screen while Hans, Eva and the visiting anthropologist engage in highly emotionally charged and mournful conversation about living with dementia. Multiple game mounts cover the living room walls and deer invigorates the rather sparse conversation between four men at a dementia day care center. In a dementia nursing home, the arrival of the visitation dog, Johnny, transforms the tranquil atmosphere between the residents doing nothing much to one of elation.

In this paper, we draw on fieldworks in private homes, day centers and nursing homes in Denmark conducted from 2021 to 2023, which contain a multiplicity of diverging voices on what lived experiences – good, bad or good enough - with dementia amounts to. To articulate this multiplicity – including voices and signatures of other-than-human interlocutors - we will think with phenomenological work on atmospheres as quasi-things (Schmitz) and interpersonal atmospheres (Osler) to explore lived social experiences of dementia - paying special attention to generative intersections of interpersonal and interspecies atmospheres.

In an attempt to both build on and expand the personhood turn in dementia studies, we argue that attention to atmospheres can highlight the highly volatile, situational and singular in-between spaces of our dementia fieldworks in ways that allow for a neuro-diverse, species-diverse, world-open and social differential ontological account of generative dementia socialities.