ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how caregivers inscribe a wide variety of objects with dementia and produce what I term ‘dementia scripts’. Dementia scripts are the visions about use that different types of materialities, like gerontechnologies, buildings and so forth, are meant to convey to people with dementia. The analysis illustrates a rich variety of dementia scripts produced by caregivers and identifies three common traits. First, they are often fashioned by mundane means but are neither simplistic nor trivial. Second, while they are often framed as the material outcome of caregivers’ responsibility and sense of concern for people with dementia, they are also based on the presumption that people with dementia pose threats to themselves. Third, they are scaled as a result of intense knowledge dissemination which means that that they are likely to have far-reaching implications for people with dementia. The chapter argues for the importance of further exploration of how dementia scripts are produced, the actors who produce them, their ethics, how they configure the experience of ageing with dementia and for the importance of questioning the assumption that gerontechnologies are always high-tech devices primarily produced for consumption and financial gain.
