Everyday activities such as navigating one’s environment and community, calling to check up on loved ones, making dinner, shopping, or carrying out religious rituals can become challenging for people with dementia. When dementia makes ordinary and mundane areas of a person’s life challenging, they may find solutions for themselves to remain in control of their life. Everyday citizenship is about this demonstration of agency in mundane everyday activities.

What everyday citizenship looks like for persons with dementia and the role culture and beliefs can play in making it so can vary from place to place. This research project focuses on people showing signs of dementia in rural Nigeria. The aim is to locate and uncover citizenship in the everyday, exploring how these people, through mundane and everyday activities, demonstrate agency and participate in their lives and community, and the religious and cultural influences (if any) to the actualisation of this everyday display of citizenship. This exploration will be guided by one main question:

What is everyday citizenship like for people showing signs of dementia in rural Nigeria?

An ethnographic and inclusive approach will be adopted to explore the perspectives of three groups 1) people showing signs of dementia in the chosen community, 2) community members, and 3) religious/traditional leaders. This project addresses the gap in literature about citizenship and/or everyday lives of people with dementia in Nigeria, and will potentially contribute to the theoretical discussion on citizenship and disability, especially within the context of Nigeria, Africa and the Global South.

Bakgrunn

Master in Social Work with Families and Children

Forskergruppe

Citizenship