Much to our pleasure we got many positive responses following the publication of our series, ‘thinking with dementia’. Some of these responses suggested novel directions in which we could think with dementia. We asked the writers to extend their stories, and invited some more authors to contribute. And so the stories continue!

While much of the research that gave rise to the fourteen stories of the previous collection was conducted in the Netherlands, the new stories take us to Japan and India, and to new themes and questions. They let us venture into medical archives and into an apartment full of sticky notes; they take us along on a discovery by looking at a photograph of a shell, and into the kitchen, with rice steaming, and vegetables frying in a pan. How can we think with dementia when it comes to living with pain, about the self as extended, as a way to stay out of prison, and about veracity? And could there be a poetics of dementia…?

By way of invitation, we would like to encourage our readers to become writers in this series by posting their thoughts and stories in the response boxes at the bottom of this page. We look forward to thinking with dementia, with you.

____

Annelieke Driessen conducted ethnographic research in three nursing homes in the Netherlands as part of her PhD project in the Anthropology of Care Research Group at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Annelieke is currently working as a Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK. As part of the research team involved in the Forms of Care project, she studies ‘active non-interventions’ as a form of care at the end of life. She edited Thinking with Dementia, along with Kristine Krause, Jeannette Pols and Emily Yates-Doerr.

This post contributes to the series, ‘Thinking with dementia.’

Read the next post in the series here.