Dementia and 'Aging in Place': Reconstructing Interactional Ordinariness at Home

Language in general has been clinically identified as both a key indicator in the diagnose of dementia diseases, and a measure of intervention in their treatments. However, deviant from a language & cognition paradigm, this paper sets off from a more sociolinguistic perspective informed by seminal studies by Hamilton (1994, 2008, 2019) and many others, and concerns itself with the question of how people living with dementia diseases stay socially connected in interactions despite their cognitive struggles, and how wider interactional contexts, especially the physical and spatial ones, play a part. Based on ethnographic and video data collected through two pilot home visits to two seniors living with Alzheimer diseases in Shanghai (as part of a larger interdisciplinary project on senior care practices in urban China), this study is particularly interested in how the setting of home influences the elders’ socialization with their families, professional healthcare workers, as well as the researchers. Preliminary interactional and ethnographic analysis highlights the agency of the seniors to ‘behave’ themselves when ‘having a guest at home’, such as being more cooperative in conversations than normal, and actively offering their hospitality to make their ‘guests’ feel more comfortable. The 'automatized’ practice (Hamilton, 1994) of these politeness norms culturally specific in Chinese context somewhat help them restore an interactional ordinariness with their conversation partners. The constructed social identity as the ‘host’ in the particular spatial setting of ‘home’ also helps to maintain their social esteem as ‘care attendant’ rather than the mere ‘care receiver’, and hence in a sense a means of resistance to the over-accommodating style of the typical ‘elderspeak’. By attending to the specific spatial contexts of these naturally occurring interactions, this study hopes to contribute to sociolinguistic enquiries on the neurodiverse ordinariness in interactional practices with wider interdisciplinary insights.