A Story of a Marriage Through Dementia and Beyond is the extraordinary, unflinching account from sociologist Laurel Richardson of her love and caregiving through the last period of her husband Ernest Lockridge's life - from his transient amnesia to his death from Lewy Body Dementia. Focusing on the lived experience of the caregiver through the loved one’s journey from mild cognitive impairment to death, the book gives the reader the experience of what the medical diagnoses mean and what has led up to the loss. It shows the complex, nuanced lives of a couple both living with the worst effects of a disease like Lewy Body Dementia, while maintaining, sometimes with hope and laughter, their loving connection nourished through a 40-year marriage. Dementia is a ‘silver tsunami’ - the third leading cause of death amongst senior populations. Richardson’s beautifully written book gives on-the-ground emotional support to those already in service as caregivers and helps prepare others for such service. Hospices, book clubs, and medical and allied professionals will find this book extraordinarily valuable. Weaving in autoethnographic and sociological methods and scholarship, as well as a list of reading and further resources for caregivers and scholars, this book will also appeal to courses in a wide range of disciplines and fields, including health communication, nursing and allied health, courses covering death and dying, end-of-life, and illness care, and, of course, scholars pursuing autoethnography, creative non-fiction, and qualitative methods.

“The voice of lived experience is ever growing and without doubt we should never miss an opportunity like this to listen, capture and learn from it.” Paola Barbarino, CEO, Alzheimer’s Disease International “This latest book will help so many people - those with dementia and their loved ones.” Victoria Derbyshire, British Journalist, Newsreader and Broadcaster “Talking with Dementia Reconsidered is a landmark, which will inspire professionals, researchers and the upcoming cohort of people whose lives are affected by dementia.” Tom Dening, Professor of Dementia Research, School of Medicine, University of Nottingham, UK “I would strongly advise all health and social care professionals to read this and rethink what they “know” about dementia.” Dr Hilda Hayo Chief Admiral Nurse and CEO, Dementia UK This book places people living with a diagnosis of dementia at its core, providing each person with the opportunity to express themselves whilst viewing their lives in relation to the Kitwood flower model. Authored by a person living with dementia, an experienced consultant clinical psychologist and a respected academic, the three combine to amplify and showcase the words of the Fifteen people living with dementia, in an original, authentic and unique way. This book: Gives readers transparent insight into the lives, hopes and fears of a diverse range of people living with various forms of dementia Shows how each petal of the Kitwood flower with love at its centre is a helpful framework for each person to describe their life Links the interviews with issues, frameworks, policy and practice Examines what stakeholders can take from this book to advance dementia care. Talking with Dementia Reconsidered truthfully adds to the growing knowledge base of what life with dementia is really like in an engaging and informative way. It is essential reading for anyone and everyone directly or indirectly affected by dementia through lived experience, studying dementia or working professionally to support those affected. The Reconsidering Dementia Series is an interdisciplinary series published by Open University Press that covers contemporary issues to challenge and engage readers in thinking deeply about the topic. The dementia field has developed rapidly in its scope and practice over the past ten years and books in this series will unpack not only what this means for the student, academic and practitioner, but also for all those affected by dementia. Series Editors: Dr Keith Oliver and Professor Dawn Brooker MBE. Dr Keith Oliver is an Alzheimer's Society Ambassador and Dementia Service User Envoy for Kent and Medway Partnership NHS Trust in the UK. He retired from being a head teacher when diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at age 55. Keith is Series editor for the Reconsidering Dementia Series. Reinhard Guss is Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and former Dementia Work Stream Lead for the Faculty of the Psychology of Older People (FPOP). Reinhard is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Neuropsychologist working within the National Health Service. Dr Ruth Bartlett is Associate Professor at the University of Southampton, UK, co-director of the University’s Doctoral Training Centre in Dementia Care and Principal Investigator of an interdisciplinary, cross-faculty research project funded by the Alzheimer’s Society.

Reimagining Narrative Therapy Through Practice Stories and Autoethnography takes a new pedagogical approach to teaching and learning in contemporary narrative therapy, based in autoethnography and storytelling. The individual client stories aim to paint each therapeutic meeting in such detail that the reader will come to feel as though they actually know the two or more people in the room. This approach moves beyond the standard narrative practice of teaching by transcripts and steps into teaching narrative therapy through autoethnography. The intention of these 'teaching tales' is to offer the reader an opportunity to enter into the very 'heart and soul' of narrative therapy practice, much like reading a novel has you enter into the lives of the characters that inhabit it. This work has been used by the authors in MA and PhD level classrooms, workshops, week-long intensive courses, and conferences around the world, where it has received commendations from both newcomer and veteran narrative therapists. The aim of this book is to introduce narrative therapy and the value of integrating autoethnographic methods to students and new clinicians. It can also serve as a useful tool for advanced teachers of narrative practices. In addition, it will appeal to established clinicians who are curious about narrative therapy (who may be looking to add it to their practice), as well as students and scholars of autoethnography and qualitative inquiry and methods.

Due to his major contributions in qualitative inquiries, Norman K. Denzin is regarded as ‘the Father of Qualitative Inquiries.’ Volume 55 of Studies in Symbolic Interaction is a compilation of writings published in his honor.

Assessing Autoethnography provides readers with multiple ways to analyze autoethnographies and other forms of personal narrative writing. Given the proliferation of such forms across academic contexts, the book offers a guide of what autoethnography is, why it matters, and how to do it. Taking each of the three parts of auto-, ethno-, and -graphy in detail, Herrmann, and Adams, provide criteria and points of discussion to ensure robust assessment of an autoethnographic work as a whole. Every chapter is accompanied with exemplars and considers issues such as ethics, storytelling, and good writing. The book discerns the kinds of personal experiences that often work best for autoethnographic projects and provide ways to evaluate fieldwork, interviews, and representations. Written by two experts in the field, Assessing Autoethnography offers guidance to scholars and dissertation advisors, across diverse disciplines, in producing autoethnographic work and utilizing autoethnographic methods. The book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of Communication Studies, Education, Sociology, Women’s and Gender Studies, Critical Race Studies, Mass Communication, English, and other related disciplines.

An Autoethnography of Fitting In: On Spinsterhood, Fatness, and Backpacker Tourism is a feminist narrative about the social rules of obedience and acquiescence to the norm – embodiment, heteronormativity, partnering – and about fitting in, or not, with those narratives. Phiona Stanley explores a period through her twenties and thirties, living and travelling alone, foreign to herself and the countries of her travel in all regards: white, cisgender, sometimes thin, sometimes fat, sometimes partnered. This fascinating volume uses these lived experiences, depicted through first-person narrative storytelling, as a prism through which to understand the subtle, social rules of gendered normative expectations. It draws on contemporary journals, letters, and photos, and features process-oriented sections that focus on the methodological possibilities these offer, and on questions of verisimilitude and subjectivity. Set in the context of transnational work in Qatar, China, and elsewhere, and "road status" as negotiated and performed among long-term backpacker tourists, this book serves as an exemplar of how autoethnography can illuminate socio-cultural normativities and their effects – which are rarely explicit, but which nevertheless have great potential to harm – while problematizing and rethinking the meanings and semantic boundaries of weight, queerness, and (hetero)normativity. Framed through reflexive autoethnography, with a strong focus on ethics and feminist theories, this book will appeal to students and researchers in autoethnography, qualitative methods, and gender and women's studies.

"This innovative book offers a discussion of how memoirs might be useful for sociologists. By reading the guide, students and teachers alike will gain an understanding of how they might approach the current outpouring of memoirs and incorporate them into their teaching, learning, writing and research"--

Coming to terms with dementia is one of the great challenges of our time. This volume of new interdisciplinary essays by internationally established scholars offers new ways of understanding and dealing with it. It explores views of dementia that go beyond the idea of loss, and rather envisions it as multilayered transformation and change of personhood and identity, and as development that mostly is socially shared with others. The studies collected here identify new empirical, theoretical, and methodological areas that will be crucial to future research and clinical practice concerned with age-related dementia. Three general themes are singled out as of particular importance and interest: persons and personhood, identity and agency, and the social and the communal.

For the first time in English, The Russian Medical Humanities: Past and Present argues that the medical humanities is a vibrant and emerging field in Post-Soviet Russia. In a unique collaboration that brings together diverse experts from both Russia and America, this volume showcases the Russian medical humanities as an interdisciplinary project that combines insights from philosophy, bioethics, anthropology, history, and literature in order to provide more compassionate medical care to patients in the twenty-first century. The chapters in this volume explore past and present humanistic trends in Russian medical training, as well as examine how Russian authors and cultural figures, some physician-writers, some without professional background in medicine of any kind, have positioned healthy and ailing bodies in their creative work. This volume’s contributors, who range from literary scholars, educators, translators and poets to medical historians, librarians, museum curators, and social workers, provide empathetic insight into the experience of medical encounters which all cultures grapple with. Their work will prove useful not only to current and future health practitioners, but also to a broader audience of readers who are seeking to make compassionate and informed decisions about healthcare for their loved ones and for themselves.

Drawing on a selection of carefully curated autobiographical and fictional portrayals of the dementia experience, this book gives voice to some of the most pressing ethical issues that commonly arise in the context of a dementing disorder, and calls attention to various forms of narrative resistance in contemporary American literature on early-onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Based on the premise that the current public discourse on AD is largely dominated by an anxiety and fear-promoting conception of the illness, this multilayered inquiry strives to look beyond the widespread horrors of forgetting and loss in AD, and, in doing so, attempts to give a better, more accurate, and more balanced impression of what it means to be living with such a diagnosis.