Social Interconnection in Dementia Care.

In this paper I draw on the ‘Dementia Talking’ corpus of 45 hours of video data collected from three distinct yet complimentary British settings: a specialist dementia care home; people with dementia’s own homes; and a GP-based memory service. In so doing, I explore how discursive (and non-discursive) acts of ‘feeling’, ‘touch’ and ‘emotion’ are constructed and interact to position the person living with a dementia as with, or without, ‘capacity’. I argue that social interconnectedness can be usefully interrogated at the micro-level of everyday practice; and that these mundane practices combine to shape, contest and (re)value broader regulatory forces.