Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses encounters between new feminist materialism and dementia care infrastructures, and the potentials such encounters have for the enactment of new modes of citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses encounters between new feminist materialism and dementia care infrastructures, and the potentials such encounters have for the enactment of new modes of citizenship. Feminist materialist thinkers, such as Barad and Haraway have challenged conventional ways of thinking about the world, the relationships between human and non-human agents, body and mind, nature and culture, language and reality etc. Some have also applied these theoretical lenses to concrete practices (e.g. indigenous studies, environmentalism, disability studies), yet few have explored the possibilities an embodied, material intra-action approach may have on the prospects of citizenship for persons living with dementia. The aim of this paper is to explore these possibilities.

A conventional understanding of citizenship is related to cognitive capacities pertaining to the individual. However, a new feminist materialist understandig would rather hinge citizenship on socio-material intra-action in everyday life situations, that is, on the collective, not the individual, and see it as performative rather than as a status. With this thinking care infrastructures (Langstrup 2013) become potential participatory innovative practices for citizenship performance, not only for the persons with dementia but for all agents involved in the care processes, because to keep the infrastructures going require work from all agents involved, including the ones with dementia (López and Sánchez-Criado 2015). This work is often invisible and consequently not appreciated (Bowker and Star 1996), but it is at the same time what shapes the very infrastructure, and is, therefore, crucial for citizenship performance.