The Socialization of Dementia: How welfare state politics and cultural change impact living with dementia in community-based care arrangements

• Applicant: Dr. Mike Laufenberg
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 289753230

This research project uses ethnographic case studies to analyze how the ongoing transformation of the welfare state, the cultural ideas about dementia and the lived experience of dementia are interrelated in the German context. In doing so, the project aims to examine current forms of socialization of old age and its associated health risks. Due to the fact that living with dementia requires high levels of care work (nursing, assistance, emotional support), care settings for people with dementia will be the primary focus. More specifically, the analysis will focus on new forms of community-based care arrangements (e.g., dementia-friendly communities), which are currently advertised as a solution to the growing need for care work for the elderly in general and for those with dementia in particular. On the one hand, the case studies aim to clarify how the transformation of welfare state politics (e.g. decentralization of government, monetarization and marketization of care services, activation of self-support resources within individuals and their environments) influences the everyday practice of caring for those living with dementia. On the other hand, this project analyzes how medicalization as a social practice shapes both the meaning of dementia and the organization and realization of care work. The assumption is that community-based care arrangements are coined by heterogeneous, partially conflicting logics: Care work for people with dementia faces political pressures to cut costs and increase efficiency, while the caregivers themselves endorse an ethics of good care that would require more labour force and time resources to be transferred into practice. Against this background, the project explores if and to what extent current forms of community-based care arrangements open new possibilities for individual and collective agency in the face of contemporary welfare state politics as well as the medicalization of dementia. By conducting empirical-ethnographic field studies (combining participant observation, focused semi-structured interviews, and document analysis), this is the first study to systematically explore within the German context how the current structural liberalization and economization of the care sector as well as cultural changes in the perception of dementia affect living with dementia in community-based care arrangements. The project is situated in the intersection of welfare state studies, sociology of medicine and care, and the sociology of ageing; it makes systematic use of theories and methods from gender and disability studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants