Aging & Society: Eighth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed growing interest in the potential for animal assistance and pet therapies to promote health and wellbeing amongst older people living with dementia. Such interventions tend to be grounded in liberal humanist assumptions, which serve to position nonhuman animals (e.g. dogs, fish, horses) as instruments and vehicles in the transmission of health benefits to older people. Drawing on empirical data from the Dementia Dogs Pilot in Scotland, UK (2012-2016) as well as theoretical frameworks developed through the writings of Donna Haraway, this paper advances a post-anthropocentric, critical posthumanist understanding of human-nonhuman relations in older age. As will be argued, such an approach involves seeing human-animal relationships in dementia as symbiotic entanglements within which processes of becoming are at stake. Based on this discussion, the paper concludes by exploring the potential for trans-species affinity (as an ontological-epistemological-ethical framework) to advance social justice in dementia and the forth age, offering a more radical alternative to that of dominant liberal humanist policy and practice frameworks.