Paper short abstract:

This study explores the affective dimensions of the lived experiences and imaginative lifeworlds of people living with dementia. With collaborative storytelling, I capture the affective and discursive practices of everyday Home-making in response to the ever-changing biosocial surroundings.

Paper long abstract:

This study explores the affective dimensions of the lived experiences and imaginative lifeworlds of people who are close to death and who are still dwelling with their progressive and degenerative mental illness ¬— namely, those living with dementia. Living under such conditions of existential crisis, complex cycles of feelings, emotions, moods, imaginations, and joy are often exposed and expressed in the process of everyday ongoing attunements to their ever-changing biosocial surroundings. Nevertheless, there are neither generally accepted theories of these affective, embodied, and material practices nor social scientific methods of these bodily transformations from the view of those affected. By inviting them and their significant others to collaborative storytelling, I capture affective and discursive practices in the process of Home-making, not as abnormal and illusive but as constitutive of everyday life. I, in particular, portray the transformative and affective experiences of an individual living in the Home, who was expelled by his Orthodox Jewish family and community for his conversion to Christianity. Despite the fact that his imagination and hope of returning home while living in the Home are painful and traumatic, his capacity to affect and be affected by his social, religious and material landscapes opens a new platform of dwelling, and continuously create a dementia-becoming otherwise. Consequently, I reveal the on-going, emergent and respond-able processes of world-making, what I call 'an art of dwelling', within his illness affordance.