Short BIO

 

 

CPDP Conference 2012 presentation

Dementia Care and Surveillance: complementary or contradictory?

Alzheimer's Disease and related late life dementias are medicalized conditions of aging that to various degrees impair memory, cognition and decision making capacity and may result in impaired self-care, wandering and confused behaviors. With the growth of older populations globally, the considerable care needed by dementia sufferers has been called 'a social policy time bomb' (Silverstein et al. 2002:4). This paper considers whether the surveillance of persons with dementia works to support their care or alternatively, to impede it. While recognizing the promise of technologies to maintain persons in communities instead of institutions, it questions the extent to which surveillance technologies can actually support the agency of persons with dementia. It further argues that surveillance technologies obscure the relational basis of care, so fundamental for supporting personhood of those undergoing fragmentation. They also intensify power differences of dementia caregivers, and risk drawing attention to pathology, further heightening medical control over persons with dementia, and further diminishing their power. Thus surveillance technologies manage subjectivities similarly to instrumental technologies that manage bodies, both leading to the erosion of personhood. Pulling from my research in dementia care and related materials, I argue that instrumental technologies contradict the type of care needed to support persons with dementia. However, I also consider conditions under which surveillance may heighten or complement care for persons with dementia, and beyond.