Abstract

Health care for people with dementia has been concerned with questions of mobility, focusing on people with dementia’s mobility as a safety threat. Little attention has been paid to what informs such forms of mobility and to the experiences of potentiality arising in them. Based on a two-year fieldwork among community-dwelling people with dementia in the Netherlands, this chapter explores the vicissitudes of moments that study participants characterized as ‘still'. It consequently follows interlocutors in the repetitive walks around the house they explained were ways of dealing with these still moments.

The chapter draws on critical phenomenology to argue that engaging in repetitive mobilities of leaving and returning home, could be the way in which this study's participants nurtured the responsive engagement with the world many of us already find ourselves involved in. This analysis not only highlights how the 'still' is a phenomenon that sparks off potentiality. It also allows us to learn about how we deal with vulnerability in all of our lives. Life and care-giving, following this account, could be about honing our abilities to respond.

Details publicatie

Forthcoming. Vermeulen, Laura “When you do nothing you die a little bit” On stillness and honing responsive existence among community-dwelling people with dementia. In: Vindrola-Padros, C., B. Vindrola-Padros & K. Lee-Crossett eds. Immobility and Medicine: Exploring Stillness, Waiting and the In-Between. Palgrave Macmillan