Disputas Dragana Lukić

Prøveforelesning over oppgitt emne holdes kl. 09:45, SVHUM E.0101:

«How to move from traditional care ethics to posthumanist perspectives and why is this shift important?»

Prøveforelesning vil bli strømmet her.

Disputasen starter kl. 10:45 samme sted, og vil bli strømmet her!

The defence will ble streamed here.

Opptak av disputasen vil være tilgjengelig i en måned. 

A recording of the disputation will be available for one month. 

Doktoravhandlingen er tilgjengelig her.

The Doctoral Thesis is available here.

Populærvitenskapelig sammendrag:

Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias have emerged as a major challenge to Western economies. Dementia appears as a set of fatal neurodegenerative brain disease syndromes that people should actively fight following the ideal of successful ageing. This understanding of dementia leads to people with dementia being seen as patients, always deficient, in need of care, and a burden on society, and possibly even treated as legal ‘non-persons’. Hence, suicide as a choice commonly figures in dementia life and fiction. Additionally, the biomedical understandings of dementia largely disregard gendered, racial, ethnic, cultural and social aspects of life. In fact, women make up the majority of those diagnosed, and constitute the majority of both professional and unpaid dementia carers.

To contend with such biomedical and often de-humanizing understandings of dementia and care practices, a humanist personhood movement arose. Through engagement with popular expressions of dementia, such as films and fiction, and participatory arts interventions in dementia care, this movement revealed how persons with dementia are much more than their disease. The movement fostered advocacy and citizenship of people living with dementia and empowered their involvement in dementia care and research. Significantly, the movement enabled the growth of cultural, creative and artistic approaches to dementia and dementia care, which generated collective transformations of dementia embodiments and the rise of dementia-friendly communities. However, an unintended effect of these new understandings was that dementia remained a fixed attribute of persons diagnosed with dementia, which could potentially also perpetuate stereotypical understandings of dementia.

To meet this challenge, and engage with dementia beyond a human individual brain disease, I employ critical feminist posthumanist frameworks in my thesis. While I build on the contributions of the personhood movement, I also move towards diffractive methodology of “agential realism” (Barad 2007) and “praxiography” (Mol 2002), to demonstrate how dementia might become “enacted” within “intra-actions” of human and nonhuman agencies. In my thesis this means entanglements of human and nonhuman or more-than-human arts materials. I engage with dementia in two different yet overlapping studies. In my first study, I intra-act with popular forms of expressing dementia and in the second study, with “co-creative” arts sessions in a residential care home in Northern Norway where the majority of residents live with some form of dementia (Zeilig et al., 2018).

This thesis includes two published articles for each of the studies. While the first two articles generated dementia enactments within popular expressions of Alzheimer’s disease, the last two articles generated dementia enactments within co-creative arts sessions in the care home. In the article “Multiple Ontologies”, I explored enactments in dramatic and musical entanglements by comparing two film adaptations of books: the American drama Still Alice (2014) and the Swedish drama A Song for Martin [En Sång för Martin] (2001). In the article “Fighting Symbolic Violence”, I explored enactments in dramatic and multisensorial entanglements by comparing two stories about women who decided to end their life due to Alzheimer’s disease. The first woman is the fictional professor Alice Howland from Still Alice, while the second is feminist professor Sandy Bem, whose life Robin M. Henig described in The Last Day (2015), a story in The New York Times Magazine.

The second study engaged with dementia beyond brain neurodegeneration in multisensorial entanglements in co-creative arts sessions with residents, health care staff, members of the Artful Dementia Research Lab (ADLab), and research assistants during six months in the care home. In the article “Diffracting Dementia”, I explored enactments in an instrument-making session, while in the article “Dementia as a Material” I explored enactments in drawing, felting and chick-making sessions in a group activity room of the care home. This article also partly described a final exhibition Gleaming Moments: Co-creative Arts Sessions [Norwegian: Gylne øyeblik: Samskapende kreative samlinger] that emerged as a co-creative achievement of the ADLab and the care home.

This thesis brings together dementia enactments from both studies (popular expressions and co-creative sessions) to provide new knowledge about dementia across artscience practices. Thus, the thesis advances critical feminist posthumanist frameworks to engage with dementia in a transdisciplinary manner. The first finding of my thesis is symbolic gendered violence of humanist biomedical and implicitly person-centred practices that multisensorial and artistic entanglements might need to fight. The second finding is situated dementia enactments that shed light on the importance of human and nonhuman entanglements for what dementia might become. The third finding is the implications that the new dementia enactments might have for generating new understandings of dementia, people living with dementia, dementia care, dementia studies, and beyond.

Hovedveileder professor Ann Therese Lotherington, UiT Norges arktiske universitet

Biveileder professor Anne Gjelsvik, NTNU

Bedømmelseskomité

Første opponent: Professor PhD Aagje M. C. Swinnen, Maastricht University, Nederland.

Andre opponent: Førsteamanuensis PhD Ingvil Førland Hellstrand, Universitetet i Stavanger

Leder av komiteen: Professor PhD Ana Luisa Sanchez Laws, UiT Norges arktiske universitet.

Disputasleder

Instituttleder Melina Duarte, Institutt for filosofi og førstesemesterstudier

De som ønsker å opponere ex. auditorio, kan sende en e-post til leder av disputas innen kl. 12:30 disputasdagen: melina.duarte@uit.no