Hilde Lindemann

Lars-Christer Hydén

Jens Brockmeier

The goal of this collection of interdisciplinary essays by internationally established scholars is to see beyond the loss in dementia to the transformation and change, often in collaboration with others, of both personhood and identity. The collection identifies a number of new empirical, theoretical, and methodological areas that will be central to both research on and clinical practice concerned with age-related dementia in the coming years. Three general themes are identified as being of particular importance and interest: persons and personhood, identity and agency, and the social and the communal.

Dementia, Identity, Personhood

Beyond Loss

As people are living longer on average than ever before, the number of those with dementia will increase. Because many will live a considerable time at home with their diagnosis, we need to know more about the ways people can adapt to and learn to live with dementia in their everyday lives. Lars-Christer Hydén argues in this book that to do so will involve re-imagining what dementia really is and what it can mean to the afflicted and their loved ones. One of the most important everyday opportunities for sharing experiences is the simple act of storytelling. But when someone close to you gradually loses the ability to tell stories and cherish the shared history you have together, this is seen as a threat to the relationship, to the feeling of belonging together, and to the identity of the person diagnosed. Therefore, learning about how people with dementia can participate in storytelling along with their families and friends helps to sustain those relationships and identities. In Entangled Narratives, Hydén not only emphasizes the possibilities that are inherent in collaborative storytelling, but instructs professionals and otherwise healthy relatives to learn how to effectively listen and, ultimately, re-imagine their patients and loved ones as collaborative meaning-makers in their lives.

Collaborative Storytelling and the Re-Imagining of Dementia

Entangled Narratives

Collaborative Storytelling and the Re-imagining of Dementia

Matti Hyvärinen

Mari Hatavara

Narrative is a pioneer concept in our trans-disciplinary age. For decades, it has been one of the most successful catchwords in literature, history, cultural studies, philosophy, and health studies. While the expansion of narrative studies has led to significant advances across a number of fields, the travels for the concept itself have been a somewhat more complex. Has the concept of narrative passed intact from literature to sociology, from structuralism to therapeutic practice or to the study of everyday storytelling? In this volume, philosophers, psychologists, literary theorists, sociolinguists, and sociologists use methodologically challenging test cases to scrutinize the types, transformations, and trajectories of the concept and theory of narrative. The book powerfully argues that narrative concepts are profoundly relevant in the understanding of life, experience, and literary texts. Nonetheless, it emphasizes the vast contextual differences and contradictions in the use of the concept.

Lars-Christer Hydén

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