The Biopolitics of Dementia

This book explores how dementia studies relates to dementia's growing public profile and corresponding research economy.

James Rupert Fletcher is Wellcome Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Manchester, UK. His research covers several areas of the dementia economy, with an emphasis on using social theory and methods to understand dementia as a political entity. He has published on subjects including informal dementia care networks, mental capacity legislation and its influence on research governance, the anti-ageing technoscience market, anti-stigma and awareness-raising campaigns regarding psychiatric disorder, the operationalisation of ethnicity and age in research, the biomarker discovery economy, the curation of dementia-friendly cultural events, dementia prevention public health strategies and environmental effects on cognition in urban settings. His lecturing spans medical sociology, the sociology of ageing, social research methods and ethical governance

1. Introduction: The Successful Failure of Dementia Research; 2. Studying Dementia: Post-1970s Divergences in Dementia Studies and the Alzheimer's Movement; 3. Anti-(bio)medical; Neuro-agnostic: Why Dementia Studies Needs Neurocritical Responses to the Biopolitics of Dementia; 4. Deconstructing Biopolitical Commitments: A Neurocritical Analysis of Biogenic Disease, Normal Ageing and Promissory Futures80; 5. Making Dementia Curable: Circling Cognition, Biomarkers and Meaningfulness; 6. Destigmatising Normality: How the Awareness Economy Misconstrues and Perpetuates Stigma; 7. Moralising Ethnicity: Governance through the Racialisation of Outcomes; 8. The Political Economy of Dementia: Post-2008 Financialisation, Awareness-as-Welfare and Speculative Demographic Alarmism; 9. Conclusion: Promissory Sociopolitical Histories