Embodied Encounters: Enacting Community in Dementia Care through Participatory Arts

This thesis examines how artists can facilitate spaces for people living in dementia care to enact and co-create community. My use of the term is inspired by the political philosophy of Robert Esposito, who critically examines community as both an obligatory gift binding beings together and exclusionary acts to preserve assumed purity of the body politic which render community void. My research follows the path of performance scholars who have come to consider art practices with people living with dementia as collaborative, a collective process co-producing social meaning, instead of attempting to transform the person. Participants are not a problem to be fixed but are considered active creators of meaning in the creative and relational process. Where many of these studies have focused on the direct practice of care, I am interested in how art practices might also break down the walls between the care home and the outside world. Inspired by dementia citizenship studies, ontological philosophy and performance theories, I propose a community framework for dementia care to consider the influence that people living with dementia, especially those in the later stages of the disease, can have on the social and communal worlds in which they co-exist. I take an ethnographic approach to research and analyse a series of arts programmes involving the participation of people living with dementia in care home settings, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a theorisation of micro moments of interactions between participants, artists and myself, I argue that a practice which is rooted in emplaced, embodied and aesthetic acts can help people living with and without dementia connect and make meaningful aesthetic contributions. I suggest that such connections have the potential to value people living in dementia care as people with atypical cognitive function who can be a strength to both their local communities and society as a whole.