Intergenerational Learning and Dementia

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the learning that happens in an intergenerational music and arts intervention with pre-verbal children and elderly people with dementia. It draws on qualitative work using a posthumanist framework of observations exploring the embodied engagement of children and elderly people with instruments, space and each other and the learning that occurred during those intra-actions (Barad, "Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning." Duke University Press, Durham, 2007). Drawing on Barad's agential realism (2003, 2007) and using a posthuman observation framework (Quinn and Blandon, "International Journal of Lifelong Education" 36:578-594, 2017), this chapter aims to reclaim notions of beginning and becoming in dementia. Using posthumanism as a navigational tool (Braidotti, "The Posthuman." Polity Press, Cambridge, 2013) and using ideas of affinity, not identity (Haraway, "Manifestly Haraway," University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2016), this research shows that it is possible to learn in dementia. [For the complete volume, "Lifelong Learning and Dementia: A Posthumanist Perspective. Palgrave Studies in Adult Education and Lifelong Learning," see ED612732.]