James Rupert Fletcher
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 224996 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | James Rupert Fletcher |
| NOMBRES | James Rupert |
| APELLIDO | Fletcher |
| FIRMA | FLETCHER J R |
| AFILIACIONES | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9198-4321 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 33 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 82 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 33 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2017 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Navigating Dementia
Age‐ and dementia‐friendliness are major areas of contemporary urban policy and scholarship, seeking to maintain older people and those with cognitive impairment in their own homes and communities. Such work relies on architectural augmentation to maximise the functionality of ageing bodies and minds and has been criticised for conceptualising place as a static unidirectional determinant of individual disability. New materialist scholarship on pl…
Cognitive co-ageing with inequitable political ecologies
Later life cognitive trajectories are increasingly hypothesised as contingent on circumstances across the lifecourse. Looking backward, epidemiological research is revealing that contemporary trends in cognitive health are partially attributable to 20th century political, economic and social transformations. Looking forward, a corresponding prevention agenda is demarcating early and mid-life lifestyles as targets for optimising future cognitive a…
Curating the 'Care-Full' Home
The short film - The Care-Full Home - explores the datafication of everyday later lives vis-à-vis emerging technologies. The film was created over 48 hours during a hackathon focussing on ageing in a digital world. It uses satire as an overarching methodology to engage with the ambiguities of datafication and the uncertain boundaries between data and undata. In this accompanying piece, we outline the creation of The Care-Full Home and discuss the…
Connecting to Cognition
Contemporary sociological developments spanning the ontological turn, post-cognitivism, biosocial transdisciplinarity, post-qualitative inquiry, and new empiricism are opening up novel sites of methodological contention regarding the nature of cognition as a research object. While these developments are conceptually stimulating, their (potential) overlapping methodological implications are under-explicated. Outlining a moving ethnography of urban…
Beyond Local Domains
Ontology in cognitive science has long been dominated by cognitivism, developing computer science metaphors to position cognition as intrinsic mind-brain information-processing. Contemporary cognitivism hypothesises localised domain-specificity, disaggregating cognition into discrete subtypes, each of which exists in a dedicated brain region. Latterly, peripheral cognitive science scholarships have contested these ideas, cultivating post-cognitiv…
Transport digitalisation
People living with cognitive impairments face new forms of disablement in the context of transport digitalisation, an issue recently catalysed by controversies regarding rail ticket office closures. Transport can dramatically impact the lives of people diagnosed with dementia, who often find their mobility suddenly and dramatically impaired. Unfortunately, sociological analysis of cognitive disability has traditionally been undermined by under-th…
Re-municipalising sociospatial infrastructure
Transport can pose substantial challenges for people with dementia. Dementia-friendly approaches seek to encourage public transport use by enhancing people and places through educational initiatives and architectural augmentation respectively. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority is implementing dementia-friendliness within a major re-municipalisation of public transport. Reporting findings from a journeying ethnography of bus travel with pa…
An ontological turn in the sociology of personal life
The sociology of personal life (SPL) has been largely untouched by sociology's ontological turn. A few scholars have attempted to retrofit SPL and new-materialist ideas, but these limited attempts have overlooked the potential for SPL to furnish its own definitive ontological contributions in dialogue with the wider turn. In response, I offer an SPL-centred ontology: the 'connective ontology' of facet methodology. Introduced in 2011, facet method…
Symbolic interactionism
Symbolic interactionism emerged in the early-twentieth century amidst fast-paced American urbanisation. Diverse and rapidly transforming cities such as Chicago, coupled with values of individual agency, were difficult to reconcile with the monolithic abstractions and structural determinism of traditional social theory. In contrast, interactionists offered a type of social thought that centred on people’s everyday actions and interpretations, thei…
Cognitivism ageing
Following recent regulatory approvals for anti-Alzheimer's monoclonal antibodies, this paper considers the contemporary role of cognitivism in defining the ontological commitments of dementia research, as well as movements away from cognitivism under the umbrella of 4E cognitive science. 4E cognitive theories, extending cognition into bodies, their environs, and active relations between the two, share potentially fruitful affinities with new mate…
Regulating the disenfranchised
The conundrum of the psychological interface
In this article, we consider how certain types of contemporary biosocial psychiatric research conceptualise and explicate biology-social relations. We compare the historic biopsychosocial model to recent examples of social defeat research on schizophrenia and cultural neuroscience work on affective disorders. This comparison reveals how the contemporary turn towards the ‘biosocial’ within psychiatric research relies upon ideas of the psychologica…
Age-discriminated IVF Access and Evidence-based Ageism
Access to state-funded fertility treatments is age-restricted in many countries based on epidemiological evidence showing age-associated fertility decline and aimed at administering scarce resources. In this article, we consider whether age-related restrictions can be considered ageist and what this entails for a normative appraisal of access criteria. We use the UK as a case study due to the state-funded and centrally regulated nature of in vitr…
The neuropsychiatric biopolitics of dementia and its ethnicity problem
Sociological analyses of dementia have long drawn on critiques of medicalisation and the medical model. This approach fails to account for late 20th/early 21st century expansion of neuropsychiatric biopolitics, wherein a more subtle and pervasive (self-)governance of health, illness, and life itself is at stake. Since the 1970s, new neuropsychiatric imaginings of dementia have been promoted, as evident in government, third sector and research tra…
Situational expectations and surveillance in families affected by dementia
Recent political processes have rendered people with dementia an increasingly surveilled population. Surveillance is a contentious issue within dementia research, spanning technological monitoring, biomarker research and epidemiological data gathering. This paper explores surveillance in the relationships of people affected by dementia, how older relatives both with and without diagnoses are surveilled in everyday interactions, and the importance…
Dissonant dementia
This paper presents an analysis of contemporary neuropsychiatric meaning-making regarding dementia, encompassing distinct beliefs, practices and objects, and the peculiarities of its fragmented public manifestations. First, some core neuropsychiatric beliefs are discussed, arguing that the designation of those beliefs as exceptional truths engenders an imperialist ethic whereby the beliefs must be spread into other populations. Second, the enactm…
Unethical governance
This paper considers the potential for the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) of England and Wales to incentivise the exclusion of people with dementia from research. The MCA is intended to standardise and safeguard the inclusion of people with cognitive impairments in research. This entails various procedural requirements, which in pressurised research contexts can lead researchers to exclude people with dementia as a means of simplifying bureaucratic co…
Understanding Health and Social Challenges for Aging and Long-Term Care in China
The second King’s College London Symposium on Ageing and Long-term Care in China was convened from 4 to 5th July 2019 at King’s College London in London. The aim of the Symposium was to have a better understanding of health and social challenges for aging and long-term care in China. This symposium draws research insights from a wide range of disciplines, including economics, public policy, demography, gerontology, public health and sociology. A …
The Care Manifesto
Chronological quarantine and ageism
In March 2020, the government of the United Kingdom advised all people aged 70 and above to self-isolate stringently for a minimum of 12 weeks in response to COVID-19. The British Society of Gerontology criticised the government for ignoring individual differences, deeming the approach ageist. Former British Geriatrics Society president David Oliver contested accusations of ageism, arguing that the approach was pragmatic discrimination based on e…
Age-associations in British politics
Debates regarding the status of age in social analysis are foundational to the sociology of aging, with scholars continually questioning the role of age as a social force. The contemporary politicization of age in British politics sheds useful light on this debate. During the past decade, age has emerged as a potent predictor of political preference in the United Kingdom, encompassing numerous intertwined political economic developments. At face …
Black knowledges matter
In my recent paper on the emergence of ethnicity-focussed dementia awareness research, I voiced concern regarding the rise of a body of work that depicts minority ethnic people in several high-income counties1 as lacking proper knowledge of dementia (Fletcher, 2020a). I noted that the diverse knowledges of different people are often deemed to be of less value than a specific neuropsychiatric knowledge, despite that purportedly superior knowledge …
Structuring unequal relations
Transitions into informal care roles are associated with various characteristics, for example gender and geographic proximity, but such associations are insufficient to explain role delegation, overlooking the interpersonal structure-agency nexuses that constitute role trajectories. This paper explores unequal role delegation within 7 families affected by dementia, presenting data from interviews with 7 people with dementia and 26 carers living i…
Finding Order through Disorder
Anti-aging technoscience & the biologization of cumulative inequality
Circularity, psychiatry & biomarkers
Discovering deviance
Regulating the disenfranchised
Chronological quarantine and ageism
In March 2020, the government of the United Kingdom advised all people aged 70 and above to self-isolate stringently for a minimum of 12 weeks in response to COVID-19. The British Society of Gerontology criticised the government for ignoring individual differences, deeming the approach ageist. Former British Geriatrics Society president David Oliver contested accusations of ageism, arguing that the approach was pragmatic discrimination based on e…
Distributed Selves
This paper presents data from interviews with seven people with dementia and twenty six carers in the United Kingdom, to explore impression management in couples living with dementia. Participants with dementia typically preferred to conceal their diagnoses and acted accordingly, but progressive decline precluded perpetual concealment. Participants therefore gradually switched to a second type of management, displaying their impairments in specif…
Mythical dementia and Alzheimerised senility
Cognitivism ageing
Following recent regulatory approvals for anti-Alzheimer's monoclonal antibodies, this paper considers the contemporary role of cognitivism in defining the ontological commitments of dementia research, as well as movements away from cognitivism under the umbrella of 4E cognitive science. 4E cognitive theories, extending cognition into bodies, their environs, and active relations between the two, share potentially fruitful affinities with new mate…
Black knowledges matter
In my recent paper on the emergence of ethnicity-focussed dementia awareness research, I voiced concern regarding the rise of a body of work that depicts minority ethnic people in several high-income counties1 as lacking proper knowledge of dementia (Fletcher, 2020a). I noted that the diverse knowledges of different people are often deemed to be of less value than a specific neuropsychiatric knowledge, despite that purportedly superior knowledge …
Navigating Dementia
Age‐ and dementia‐friendliness are major areas of contemporary urban policy and scholarship, seeking to maintain older people and those with cognitive impairment in their own homes and communities. Such work relies on architectural augmentation to maximise the functionality of ageing bodies and minds and has been criticised for conceptualising place as a static unidirectional determinant of individual disability. New materialist scholarship on pl…
Transport digitalisation
People living with cognitive impairments face new forms of disablement in the context of transport digitalisation, an issue recently catalysed by controversies regarding rail ticket office closures. Transport can dramatically impact the lives of people diagnosed with dementia, who often find their mobility suddenly and dramatically impaired. Unfortunately, sociological analysis of cognitive disability has traditionally been undermined by under-th…
Re-municipalising sociospatial infrastructure
Transport can pose substantial challenges for people with dementia. Dementia-friendly approaches seek to encourage public transport use by enhancing people and places through educational initiatives and architectural augmentation respectively. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority is implementing dementia-friendliness within a major re-municipalisation of public transport. Reporting findings from a journeying ethnography of bus travel with pa…
An ontological turn in the sociology of personal life
The sociology of personal life (SPL) has been largely untouched by sociology's ontological turn. A few scholars have attempted to retrofit SPL and new-materialist ideas, but these limited attempts have overlooked the potential for SPL to furnish its own definitive ontological contributions in dialogue with the wider turn. In response, I offer an SPL-centred ontology: the 'connective ontology' of facet methodology. Introduced in 2011, facet method…
Positioning ethnicity in dementia awareness research
Over recent decades, the importance of increasing dementia awareness has been promoted by charities, researchers and governments. In response, a large body of research has emerged that evaluates the awareness of different populations. One such population are minority ethnic communities. Associated studies typically conclude that minority ethnic groups have a poor awareness of dementia and that interventions should be developed to better educate t…
Uncertainties When Applying the Mental Capacity Act in Dementia Research
The Mental Capacity Act (MCA) has been in force in England and Wales for over a decade. Although often considered in relation to health and social care, the MCA also governs the inclusion of people with cognitive impairment in research. This includes procedures for establishing whether prospective participants are able to consent to participation. Despite its importance in research, there is little literature detailing accounts of researcher’s ex…
A symbolic interactionism of dementia
The conundrum of the psychological interface
In this article, we consider how certain types of contemporary biosocial psychiatric research conceptualise and explicate biology-social relations. We compare the historic biopsychosocial model to recent examples of social defeat research on schizophrenia and cultural neuroscience work on affective disorders. This comparison reveals how the contemporary turn towards the ‘biosocial’ within psychiatric research relies upon ideas of the psychologica…
The neuropsychiatric biopolitics of dementia and its ethnicity problem
Sociological analyses of dementia have long drawn on critiques of medicalisation and the medical model. This approach fails to account for late 20th/early 21st century expansion of neuropsychiatric biopolitics, wherein a more subtle and pervasive (self-)governance of health, illness, and life itself is at stake. Since the 1970s, new neuropsychiatric imaginings of dementia have been promoted, as evident in government, third sector and research tra…
Structuring unequal relations
Transitions into informal care roles are associated with various characteristics, for example gender and geographic proximity, but such associations are insufficient to explain role delegation, overlooking the interpersonal structure-agency nexuses that constitute role trajectories. This paper explores unequal role delegation within 7 families affected by dementia, presenting data from interviews with 7 people with dementia and 26 carers living i…
Anti-aging technoscience & the biologization of cumulative inequality
From fighting animals to the biosocial mechanisms of the human mind
Social defeat is a psychiatric theory accounting for the role of social environment in the aetiology of psychosis via the mechanism of stress. Social defeat stems from animal studies of stress, whereby a small rat is introduced into a larger rat's cage and is subsequently attacked and defeated by its larger foe. The defeated rat is subjected to behavioural and hormonal analyses to explore its stress levels. The idea is that social defeat leads to…
Beyond Local Domains
Ontology in cognitive science has long been dominated by cognitivism, developing computer science metaphors to position cognition as intrinsic mind-brain information-processing. Contemporary cognitivism hypothesises localised domain-specificity, disaggregating cognition into discrete subtypes, each of which exists in a dedicated brain region. Latterly, peripheral cognitive science scholarships have contested these ideas, cultivating post-cognitiv…
Age-discriminated IVF Access and Evidence-based Ageism
Access to state-funded fertility treatments is age-restricted in many countries based on epidemiological evidence showing age-associated fertility decline and aimed at administering scarce resources. In this article, we consider whether age-related restrictions can be considered ageist and what this entails for a normative appraisal of access criteria. We use the UK as a case study due to the state-funded and centrally regulated nature of in vitr…
The Care Manifesto
Age-associations in British politics
Debates regarding the status of age in social analysis are foundational to the sociology of aging, with scholars continually questioning the role of age as a social force. The contemporary politicization of age in British politics sheds useful light on this debate. During the past decade, age has emerged as a potent predictor of political preference in the United Kingdom, encompassing numerous intertwined political economic developments. At face …
A symbolic interactionism of dementia
Discovering deviance
Uncertainties When Applying the Mental Capacity Act in Dementia Research
The Mental Capacity Act (MCA) has been in force in England and Wales for over a decade. Although often considered in relation to health and social care, the MCA also governs the inclusion of people with cognitive impairment in research. This includes procedures for establishing whether prospective participants are able to consent to participation. Despite its importance in research, there is little literature detailing accounts of researcher’s ex…
Mythical dementia and Alzheimerised senility
Circularity, psychiatry & biomarkers
Anti-aging technoscience & the biologization of cumulative inequality
From fighting animals to the biosocial mechanisms of the human mind
Social defeat is a psychiatric theory accounting for the role of social environment in the aetiology of psychosis via the mechanism of stress. Social defeat stems from animal studies of stress, whereby a small rat is introduced into a larger rat's cage and is subsequently attacked and defeated by its larger foe. The defeated rat is subjected to behavioural and hormonal analyses to explore its stress levels. The idea is that social defeat leads to…
Positioning ethnicity in dementia awareness research
Over recent decades, the importance of increasing dementia awareness has been promoted by charities, researchers and governments. In response, a large body of research has emerged that evaluates the awareness of different populations. One such population are minority ethnic communities. Associated studies typically conclude that minority ethnic groups have a poor awareness of dementia and that interventions should be developed to better educate t…
Distributed Selves
This paper presents data from interviews with seven people with dementia and twenty six carers in the United Kingdom, to explore impression management in couples living with dementia. Participants with dementia typically preferred to conceal their diagnoses and acted accordingly, but progressive decline precluded perpetual concealment. Participants therefore gradually switched to a second type of management, displaying their impairments in specif…
Dissonant dementia
This paper presents an analysis of contemporary neuropsychiatric meaning-making regarding dementia, encompassing distinct beliefs, practices and objects, and the peculiarities of its fragmented public manifestations. First, some core neuropsychiatric beliefs are discussed, arguing that the designation of those beliefs as exceptional truths engenders an imperialist ethic whereby the beliefs must be spread into other populations. Second, the enactm…
Unethical governance
This paper considers the potential for the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) of England and Wales to incentivise the exclusion of people with dementia from research. The MCA is intended to standardise and safeguard the inclusion of people with cognitive impairments in research. This entails various procedural requirements, which in pressurised research contexts can lead researchers to exclude people with dementia as a means of simplifying bureaucratic co…
Understanding Health and Social Challenges for Aging and Long-Term Care in China
The second King’s College London Symposium on Ageing and Long-term Care in China was convened from 4 to 5th July 2019 at King’s College London in London. The aim of the Symposium was to have a better understanding of health and social challenges for aging and long-term care in China. This symposium draws research insights from a wide range of disciplines, including economics, public policy, demography, gerontology, public health and sociology. A …
The Care Manifesto
Chronological quarantine and ageism
In March 2020, the government of the United Kingdom advised all people aged 70 and above to self-isolate stringently for a minimum of 12 weeks in response to COVID-19. The British Society of Gerontology criticised the government for ignoring individual differences, deeming the approach ageist. Former British Geriatrics Society president David Oliver contested accusations of ageism, arguing that the approach was pragmatic discrimination based on e…
Age-associations in British politics
Debates regarding the status of age in social analysis are foundational to the sociology of aging, with scholars continually questioning the role of age as a social force. The contemporary politicization of age in British politics sheds useful light on this debate. During the past decade, age has emerged as a potent predictor of political preference in the United Kingdom, encompassing numerous intertwined political economic developments. At face …
Black knowledges matter
In my recent paper on the emergence of ethnicity-focussed dementia awareness research, I voiced concern regarding the rise of a body of work that depicts minority ethnic people in several high-income counties1 as lacking proper knowledge of dementia (Fletcher, 2020a). I noted that the diverse knowledges of different people are often deemed to be of less value than a specific neuropsychiatric knowledge, despite that purportedly superior knowledge …
Structuring unequal relations
Transitions into informal care roles are associated with various characteristics, for example gender and geographic proximity, but such associations are insufficient to explain role delegation, overlooking the interpersonal structure-agency nexuses that constitute role trajectories. This paper explores unequal role delegation within 7 families affected by dementia, presenting data from interviews with 7 people with dementia and 26 carers living i…
Finding Order through Disorder
The conundrum of the psychological interface
In this article, we consider how certain types of contemporary biosocial psychiatric research conceptualise and explicate biology-social relations. We compare the historic biopsychosocial model to recent examples of social defeat research on schizophrenia and cultural neuroscience work on affective disorders. This comparison reveals how the contemporary turn towards the ‘biosocial’ within psychiatric research relies upon ideas of the psychologica…
Age-discriminated IVF Access and Evidence-based Ageism
Access to state-funded fertility treatments is age-restricted in many countries based on epidemiological evidence showing age-associated fertility decline and aimed at administering scarce resources. In this article, we consider whether age-related restrictions can be considered ageist and what this entails for a normative appraisal of access criteria. We use the UK as a case study due to the state-funded and centrally regulated nature of in vitr…
The neuropsychiatric biopolitics of dementia and its ethnicity problem
Sociological analyses of dementia have long drawn on critiques of medicalisation and the medical model. This approach fails to account for late 20th/early 21st century expansion of neuropsychiatric biopolitics, wherein a more subtle and pervasive (self-)governance of health, illness, and life itself is at stake. Since the 1970s, new neuropsychiatric imaginings of dementia have been promoted, as evident in government, third sector and research tra…
Situational expectations and surveillance in families affected by dementia
Recent political processes have rendered people with dementia an increasingly surveilled population. Surveillance is a contentious issue within dementia research, spanning technological monitoring, biomarker research and epidemiological data gathering. This paper explores surveillance in the relationships of people affected by dementia, how older relatives both with and without diagnoses are surveilled in everyday interactions, and the importance…
Symbolic interactionism
Symbolic interactionism emerged in the early-twentieth century amidst fast-paced American urbanisation. Diverse and rapidly transforming cities such as Chicago, coupled with values of individual agency, were difficult to reconcile with the monolithic abstractions and structural determinism of traditional social theory. In contrast, interactionists offered a type of social thought that centred on people’s everyday actions and interpretations, thei…
Cognitivism ageing
Following recent regulatory approvals for anti-Alzheimer's monoclonal antibodies, this paper considers the contemporary role of cognitivism in defining the ontological commitments of dementia research, as well as movements away from cognitivism under the umbrella of 4E cognitive science. 4E cognitive theories, extending cognition into bodies, their environs, and active relations between the two, share potentially fruitful affinities with new mate…
Regulating the disenfranchised
Sociology (30 obras) · Medicine (23 obras) · Psychology (23 obras) · Dementia (19 obras) · Political science (17 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Epistemology (13 obras) · Cognition (11 obras) · Psychiatry (11 obras) · Social Psychology (11 obras)