(Not) Lovely
Enacting solidarity in dementia care through participatory Arts
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12153643 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Chloé Bradwell (0000-0002-4368-7610, Leeds Beckett University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 75 |
| Pages | 101352-101352 |
| Publication date | 2025-08-08 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Aging Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0890-4065 • E-ISSN: 1879-193X |
| Publisher | Elsevier BV (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.jaging.2025.101352 |
| PMID | 41352883 |
| OpenAlex | W4413249822 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 33 |
This article considers how artists can help highlight the value of negative emotions for care home residents living with dementia. It continues the discussion on arts and health in dementia care by looking at wellbeing beyond mere individual happiness and considering sadness as an integral part of it. This study focuses on Entelechy Arts, a participatory arts company creating cultural programmes for isolated older adults and those in care environments. Focusing on a specific interaction from their Walking Through Walls programme, this article offers a thick description and theoretical analysis of how the creative practitioners fostered solidarity among artists, residents, and staff by validating a resident's feelings of sadness and anger through kinaesthetic attunement. The study argues that by attuning to negative emotions, artists can challenge notions of utopian happiness. This counters the idea that negative emotions must be suppressed to promote wellbeing and enact solidarity as a collective and activist act of care. This is critical in the context of care home residents living with dementia, for whom negative feelings are often interpreted as challenging behaviours that can lead to medication and isolation. Instead, this paper suggests that artists can help re-frame such behaviours as important relational acts that challenge the normalisation of oppressive institutional systems
Art · Citizen journalism · Dementia · Political science · Sociology · Solidarity · The arts · Visual arts · Art Therapy and Mental Health · Gender Studies · Medicine · Participatory Visual Research Methods · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Gerontology
The Interpretation of Cultures
Rights in Mind
The art of mind changing—solidarity in dementia care
Attunement in Expressive Arts Therapy
Solidarity in the Moral Imagination of Bioethics
Not in the Mood
The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research
Reconceptualising Behavioral and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia
Towards an aesthetics of care
Slowing down
Using creative, sensory and embodied research methods when working with people with dementia
Evoking Empathy or Enacting Solidarity with Marginalized Communities? A Case Study of Journalistic Humanizing Techniques in the San Francisco Homeless Project
The personal is political
That the Past May Yet Have Another Future
Situated Knowledges
Relational citizenship
Organizational ethnography between toolbox and world-making
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |