In this chapter we set out certain guiding co-ordinates for future critical methodologies for dementia studies and appraise existing approaches through a critical lens. The chapter brings into dialogue the work of two critical commentators and considers the implications of their work for dementia studies. The first, Alison Kafer, has outlined an integrative approach that marries feminist, queer and crip perspectives to propose a political-relational framing of illness and disability. The second, Patti Lather, a feminist ethnographer, has called for a different kind of ethnography, one that works in the ruins of confident social sciences and that embraces uncertainty and unknowing as methodological strengths. We focus particularly upon word-based and spoken methods, raising questions about the status of this type of research data and how it is handled and subsequently communicated. In particular, we seek to disrupt and open to question common assumptions, routines and unmarked aspects of the research process in dementia scholarship. Drawing upon arguments and insights developed in the course of this book, our discussion leads to a call for dementia researchers to bring ourselves closer in to the experiences of people living with dementia while questioning and distancing ourselves from notions of dementia as a fixed and stable category.