This chapter introduces critical dementia studies and gives a brief overview of the chapters and the thinking behind the structure of the volume. The introduction discusses the timeliness of critical dementia studies and the impetus behind the volume. Dementia is commonly understood as a disease category, ahistorical and value-free. Critical dementia studies, however, approaches dementia as a socially produced, political category, open to transformation and social change. Overall, critical dementia studies encompasses a diverse set of approaches that problematise, defamiliarise, denaturalise and destabilise common assumptions and orthodoxies in dementia research, policy and practice.

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.

This chapter engages in critical dialogues between dementia studies and feminist scholarship. More specifically, the chapter explores how feminist studies can be useful for thinking and rethinking dementia and difference. The chapter engages with two feminist genealogies: feminist difference theory and feminist standpoint theory. Dementia has frequently been conceptualised in terms of negative difference as loss and deterioration, in particular in bio-medical discourse. More recent discourses have in contrast sought to underscore the sameness and normality of people with dementia, but this approach also functions to reinstate people with dementia into cognonormative Western modernist ideals of activity, agency and autonomy. Feminist difference theorists, however, provide ways of thinking affirmative difference. This approach to difference is neither a recourse to pathological difference nor to assimilationist sameness, but enables ways of thinking dementia as lived and embodied difference. The second approach to difference, feminist standpoint theory, concerns the different positionalities of people with dementia. In this argument, people with dementia, in particular those experiencing multiple forms of oppression, are understood as holding epistemic privilege – a particular knowledge of the oppressions of cognitive ableism. The chapter proposes a ‘“demented” standpoint’ as a way of approaching the different and unique knowledge of people with dementia and discusses further how this requires radical rethinking of methodologies in dementia studies.