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.