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Paper short abstract

Ethnographies of relations between people with dementia prompt the decentering of dementia-as-difference as a carefully critical practice. Instead, situational, performative notions of sharedness and divergence might bolster the right to opacity (Glissant 1997) – or not to be particularly different.

Paper long abstract

Dementia has been articulated in relation to normality in multiple ways, sometimes highlighting its emancipatory potential. Definitions of dementia-as-difference indeed impact upon caring and dwelling with the condition. But is such redefining a sufficient – and even necessary – critical practice if, as queer, decolonial, and feminist literatures show, “any attempt to integrate otherness by ‘addressing’ difference is fraught” (Meissner and Heil 2021, 742)?

Relations between persons with dementia amplify this question, reminding that socialities result from correspondence in situations where it is unclear and unstable who the other is. Drawing on ethnographic collaboration in a daycare center in Belgium, I suggest carefully critical practices (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) that affirm these neglected relations and reflect the situational, performative notions of sharedness and divergence these manifest.

Here, I analyze lunch times – moments of synchronization – in light of a “differential social ontology” (Gron and Dyring 2021). This critical phenomenological analytic evinces that shared realities emerge in relations between relations (e.g., between bodies and their stomach, or othered bodies) that re-arrange the differences that matter. Thickening differentially shared worlding, I engage the concept of “convivial disintegration” (Meissner and Heil 2021) – a provocation of inclusion as a maxim that establishes the open-endedness of differential dwelling.

I suggest that decentering difference is urgent, and speculative: moving towards care in the community, it is likely that not more expertise, but agility in uncertainty and discomfort are critical and foster the right to opacity (Glissant 1997) – not to be particularly different.