The title of this paper makes a direct reference to Stewart’s essay ‘Atmospheric attunements’. These attunements are “a process of what Heidegger called worlding” (Stewart, 2011, p. 455).
Interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) is a methodology that privileges the voices of participants to offer invaluable insight into unique and everyday experiences specific to their life-world (Smith et al., 2022). Phenomenology (from a Heideggerian perspective), hermeneutics, and idiography are the three main theoretical underpinnings for IPA. Using video as an art-based method can also give voice to marginalised groups, and visibility to domestic spaces where informal dementia care happens.
Dementia not only affects the person with the condition; it affects family members and significantly impacts informal caregivers’ quality of life and health.
Research grounded in a biomedical model of dementia situates expertise with the health professional. Research focussed on exploring lived experience can shift the locus of where expertise is presumed, and generate novel understandings of expert in a ‘craft and dementia’ context.
Whilst there have been studies that examine craft-engagement as a model to improve wellbeing for people with dementia, studies like Fletcher and Eckberg (2014) present a compelling argument to broaden this field of research to explore relational aspects of creativity for the dementia-care dyad.
Dementia disproportionately affects women, but their voices are not often visible in research literature. These voices and places of lived experience are often hidden or ignored by discourses that homogenise the narrative of the dementia experience.
Craft technologies are bodies of knowledge, socially shared and collectively produced and reproduced (Gell, 1998). Discussing the finding of the study, Gell’s thesis adds insight to how the daughters’ experientially and cognitively encounter their mother’s present-day crafting as a body of knowledge, that is socially shared, and reproduced in ways that fosters mutual reciprocity for the dementia care dyad.
