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This study is grounded in my concerns, as a HE lecturer in Dementia Studies, about the difficulties practitioner-students face in writing reflectively about their work with people who have dementia. I introduced a short fiction film, Ex Memoria, into the curriculum, initially as a means of ascertaining whether the use of an arts-based approach would facilitate greater reflection among students more familiar with biomedical perspectives on dementia. The film attempts to convey the experiences of a woman with dementia, a Polish-Jewish refugee from wartime Poland, now living in a London care home. Twenty two students completed either coursework assignments or reviews based on the film. The findings suggest that the psychosocial perspective which underpins the Dementia Studies programme, and has been widely promoted as a corrective to the biomedical ¿standard paradigm¿ (Kitwood, 1997), itself contributes to the ahistorical and depoliticized positioning of people with dementia, their families, and professional caregivers. In conclusion I argue that the psychologisation of dementia has contributed to its academic marginalisation. A broader, more transdisciplinary approach is required; one which sets dementia in the context of 20th century history, and thus avoids the social amnesia (Jacoby, 1996) currently affecting dementia studies.

No / In many respects, the so-called dementia community has arrived rather belatedly at a debate on rights and citizenship in relation to dementia. Only recently have we begun to witness the emergence of policy and analysis where questions concerning rights, equality and social participation are being explicitly addressed. In this context, much can potentially be learned from the earlier campaigns for equality and the critical response they have subsequently engendered. Indeed, it might be argued that a more critical level or layer of analysis is largely missing from the field of dementia studies that only becomes clear when we draw comparisons to these other struggles for emancipation. It is this gap, or critical silence, in the field of dementia studies that we wish to consider in this symposium. Our intention is to make the case for a more radical critique of the social construction, conditions and politics of dementia. The papers in this symposium represent an effort to open up a critical space to reflect upon the positioning of people with dementia as part of a wider social, historical and cultural response to debility in later life. This wider context provides the basis to examine a discourse that remains saturated with a medicalised logic of individual deficit, and is increasingly cast in a binary relationship to notions of ‘healthy ageing’ and to an unspecified and unmarked norm of ‘able-mindedness’. We are interested in the ways that particular discourses surrounding dementia have closed down or circumvented ‘alternative realities’. How, for example has the recent struggle for acceptance and inclusion driven by a neoliberal politics of normalisation overshadowed a politics of ‘anti-normalisation’ that has previously marked the emergence of queer studies, radical feminism and crip/critical disability studies, all of which have evolved at the margins of an increasingly mainstream discourse of rights and recognition? This symposium is then a first step toward a more critical approach within dementia studies and will stake out new territory for the field while illustrating the benefits of learning from other radical and critical movements. / Conference website: http://www.aginggraz2017.com/conference-schedule

Yes / Ex Memoria is a short film - just 15 minutes long - which focuses on the experience of Eva, a woman with dementia living in a nursing home. The film - which is the result of a collaboration between Bradford Dementia Group (BDG), writer/director Josh Appignanesi, and producer Mia Bays - attempts to show how life might be experienced from Eva's point of view, in her 'version of reality'. In this article I will outline the to the making of Ex Memoria, explain how the film is being used on the Dementia Studies courses provided by BDG, and - without giving away too much of the story for people who haven't yet seen the film - summarise some of the responses to it.