‘Going with the flow’ of dementia: a reply to Nigel Rapport on the social ethics of care

Dawson, Andrew and Goodwin-Hawkins, Bryonny ORCID: 0000-0002-9399-5486 (2018) ‘Going with the flow’ of dementia: a reply to Nigel Rapport on the social ethics of care. Australian Journal of Anthropology, 29 (2). pp. 258-262. doi:10.1111/taja.12286

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Abstract

In this editors’ reply to Nigel Rapport’s Afterword to the articles collected in the special issue ‘Moralities of care in later life’, we wonder: does the social ethics of care come with unacknowledged limits? We join with Rapport’s call to maintain the individual’s ‘personal preserve’ but observe—critically—that his “so far as possible, for as long as possible” makes for an uncomfortable caveat. To do so, we return ethnographically to the former mining town of Ashington, Northern England, and illustratively to a disease typically associated with the progressive loss of personhood: dementia. In contrast to both prevailing biomedical and person-centred views of dementia, we adopt a radically relational approach, which in practice calls for attentiveness and opening oneself up on the part of the carer to the individual life-world of another. Or, as it was for Ashington residents Eric and Elizabeth, a care-full inter-relationship re-found in ‘going with the flow’.

Item Type: Article
Article Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Nigel Rapport; Care; Ethics; Dementia
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology.
R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Divisions: Schools and Research Institutes > Countryside and Community Research Institute
Research Priority Areas: Place, Environment and Community
Depositing User: Rhiannon Goodland
Date Deposited: 15 Sep 2020 09:14
Last Modified: 04 Feb 2022 16:45
URI: https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/8745

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