Constructing dementia. Public, organizational and personal narratives of dementia in Belgium.

The research adopts a social constructionist perspective to argue that the meaning of dementia is not stable, but embedded in a contingent social, political and cultural context. The dominant biomedical model focuses on dementia solely as a degenerative neurological condition. Many narratives of dementia convey the biomedical model, and are grounded in a discourse of loss. But a variety of alternative and more emancipatory narratives circulate as well - albeit in a more hidden way. They emphasize the agency of people with dementia, or focus on the citizenship of people with dementia and contest their social exclusion. The research assumes that a rich variety of competing narratives of dementia co-exists today.

The objective of the study is to identify, describe and understand different narratives of dementia at the public level, i.e. public policy and mass media, the organisational level, i.e. professional care institutions and civil society, and the personal level, i.e. narratives of individuals. Methodologically, the research innovatively draws on a combination of narrative analysis, discourse-theoretical analysis and genre analysis. This means that the research not only looks at how narratives define dementia, but also at the more encompassing discourses (i.e. worldviews and ideologies) onto which the narratives are grafted, and at the textual/formal characteristics of the narratives and how these characteristics entail an oppressing or emancipatory potential.