Personhood as projection: the value of multiple conceptions of personhood for understanding the dehumanisation of people living with dementia.

We examine the concept of personhood in relation to people living with dementia and implications for the humanity of care, drawing on a body of ethnographic work. Much debate has searched for an adequate account of the person for these purposes. Broad contrasts can be made between accounts focusing on cognition and mental faculties, and accounts focusing on embodied and relational aspects of the person.

Pad cultures: An ethnography of continence care and its consequences for people living with dementia during a hospital admission.

Background: There is little research examining how continence care is organised and delivered to people living with dementia across an acute hospital admission, despite the prevalence of this patient population and their vulnerability within these settings.

Objective: To explore how continence care is delivered to people living with dementia during an acute hospital admission.

Design: Ethnographic.

Using Signs and Symbols to Label Hospital Patients with a Dementia Diagnosis: Help or Hindrance to Care?

Signs and symbols may be used in attempts to direct attention to particular aspects of patient care and hence affect how the patient is seen. An ethnography within five hospitals across England and Wales explored how everyday technologies are enrolled on acute wards to drive attention to the existence, diagnosis, and needs of people living with dementia within their ageing population. We explore how signs and symbols as everyday "technologies of attention" both produce and maintain the invisibilities of people living with dementia and of the older population within those wards and bring about particular understandings of the classification of dementia.

Presentation of the clothed self on the hospital ward: an ethnographic account of perceptual attention and implications for the personhood of people living with dementia.

This study contributes to our understanding of the 'medical gaze' and its impact on the ways in which people living with dementia experience care during a hospital admission. Visual perception has a powerful effect on our emotional and moral reactions to others. One aspect of how we perceive and respond to others is through clothing, which relates strongly to class and social position.