Charlotta Plejert - Böcker

Bringing together cutting-edge research from a group of international scholars, this innovative volume examines how people with dementia interact with others in a variety of social contexts, ranging from everyday conversation to clinical settings. Drawing on methods from conversation analysis, it sheds light on how people with dementia accomplish relevant goals in interaction, as well as how changes in an individual's discursive abilities may affect how conversationalists negotiate a world in common and continue to build their social relationships. By exploring interaction, this book breaks new ground in challenging the commonplace assumptions about what constitutes typical or atypical interactions in communication involving people with dementia, and further demonstrates the unique and creative strategies all speakers employ to facilitate better and more collaborative communication. It is essential reading for academic researchers and advanced students across sociolinguistics, interactional linguistics and conversational analysis, as well as health care practitioners.

This book brings together international, linguistic research with a focus on interaction in multilingual encounters involving people with dementia in care and healthcare settings. The methodologies used (Conversation Analysis, Ethnography and Discursive Constructionism) capture practices on the micro-level, revealing how very subtle details may be of critical importance for the everyday well-being of participants with dementia, particularly in settings and contexts where there is a lack of a common verbal language of interlocutors, or where language abilities have been lost as a result of dementia. Chapters analyse the practices and actions employed by interlocutors to facilitate mutual understanding, enhance high-quality social relations and assure optimal care and treatment, in spite of language and cognitive difficulties, with an emphasis put on the participants’ remaining capacities, and what can be achieved between people with dementia and their interlocutors in a collaborative fashion. This book goes beyond the study of two-party communication to address multiparty and group interactions which are common in residential care and other healthcare settings and will be of interest to professionals and policy makers as well as to medical sciences and linguistics researchers and students.