Sensing in Liminal Spaces: Words, Music and Dementia

This chapter offers insight into a project which provokes alternative educational futures and imaginative ways of facing current challenging issues, in this case dementia, through adopting an approach which values emergence, creativity and care-ful responses. In our co-writing and making, we reflect on an improvisatory musical practice involving people with dementia, their family, carers and a team of professional musicians and facilitators, working together with voices, instruments, words and images. We consider this practice, melding the human, the sonic and the material, in dialogue with posthuman theory which we weave together with music, words and images creatively generated by the group and the authors in recent workshops both in person and online. Through a series of ‘diffractions’ of our data, we consider how those living with dementia may help us to focus on learning as a response-able encounter, a co-creative emergence in a liminal space that opens towards the unforeseeable future. There are a series of field recordings that accompany this text: you will find links to them next to headings and subheadings; we invite you to listen to them as you read.