Title: Dementia and dress: embodiment, identity and personhood
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: The study explores the significance of clothing and dress in the lives and experiences of people with dementia and their carers. Clothing and dementia are not obviously linked. Clothes are associated with fashion, consumption, agency, display: dementia is assumed to erode these. The study, however, argues that clothing and dress are potentially relevant to the well being and lives of people with dementia. They touch on important issues in relation to the body, identity and self. As such, they offer routes into being and selfhood that are potentially significant for rethinking the ways in which we relate to and support this group. Changing thinking in relation to people with dementia is important. With an ageing population, more people will be living with the condition. Until recently, however, popular discourse has been dominated by pessimism and fear. People with dementia have been objectified and Othered. There is a need for thinking that can shift the agenda towards more productive, less stigmatising accounts. This has begun to emerge in the personhood - and related citizenship - agendas and in the new emphasis on 'living with' dementia. The project contributes to these developments by emphasising the subjectivity of the person with dementia and their relationships with family carers and care workers. It focuses on their day-to-day lives at a practical, experiential and embodied level. The study looks at two groups: those living in care homes and those in domestic settings. In both cases the aim is to understand the role of dress in their day to day lives and to identify issues and problems that may arise. It will look at how clothing is managed in care homes. Drawing on the views and experiences of managers and care workers, it will explore problems presented and solutions found. Examples of good practice at the organisational and interactive levels will be publicised in the subsequent dissemination/impact strategy. The study will also contribute to our understanding of day-to-day domestic nature of care through interviews with informal or family carers. Clothes have an intimate bodily quality that mean that they can be sites of struggle and resistance. People with dementia can behave in ways that distress or embarrass others: over and under dressing, adopting bizarre modes, disrobing in public. The study will explore the nature of these conflicts, attempting to understand them from the perspectives of both the carer and the person with dementia. In doing so it will contribute to our understanding of the dayto- day nature of care and of familial and personal relations. The overall aim of the project is the make the lives of people with dementia and their carers better: to improve practice through encouraging more sensitive and person oriented responses; to widen the terms in which their lives discussed; and to support claims on the basis of citizenship. In doing so it is hoped that it will contribute to a more general shift in thinking in relation to this group.


Research activity codes: 7.1 INDIVIDUAL CARE NEEDS
Health categories: NEUROLOGICAL