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11 - Maintaining Personhood and Authority in Everyday Talk of a Family Living with Dementia

from Part 4 - Dementia and Epistemics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2024

By
Lyndsay M. Lindley
Edited by
Peter Muntigl ,
Charlotta Plejert  and
Danielle Jones
Peter Muntigl
Affiliation:
Universiteit Gent, Belgium
Charlotta Plejert
Affiliation:
Linköpings Universitet, Sweden
Danielle Jones
Affiliation:
University of Bradford
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Summary

Part of a wider study of family interaction, this chapter focuses on the interactional competence of a person living with dementia and some ways in which her independence is facilitated, and personhood validated, by her interlocutors. Drawing on a corpus of 15 hours of naturally occurring conversation, the study investigates the interactional practices of a woman diagnosed with dementia (Dana) in conversation with a variety of interlocutors including family caregivers, teenage grandchildren and community service providers. This chapter examines sequences of advice-giving, shared reminiscence and occasions of confusion. Dana first draws on a lifetime of expertise as a waitress to advise her granddaughter who has recently begun her first job; second, in a sequence of reminiscence, conversational partners describe a shared experience that Dana is able to assess and engage with despite potentially being unable to remember the details for herself; finally, the analysis shows how the actions of probing and testing can lead to interactional breakdown and confusion, but then note how Dana is able to recover from the situation by moving to a familiar topic and claiming epistemic authority.

Keywords

advice-givingassessment’Do you remember?’epistemic authorityexecutive functionreminiscencesequential implicativeness
Type
Chapter
Information
Dementia and Language
The Lived Experience in Interaction
 , pp. 249 - 266
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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