Abstract
Moser investigates the politics of and interferences between different practices of Alzheimer’s Disease. Making visible how current practices concerning AD are implicated in politics may help to make these politics more open, reflexive, and collective, and thus, contribute to responsible innovation. The chapter explores how Alzheimer’s disease is ‘made to matter’ in a number of locations, including an international Alzheimer’s patients’ movement; a medical textbook and diagnostic context; laboratory science; daily care practice; an advertisement for anti-dementia medication; general practice; and parliamentary politics. Moser argues that to open up the politics of AD, we need: first, to trace the multiplicity of realities-in-progress, the alternatives they present and the politics they imply; and, second, to appreciate the complex relations and interferences in which they are produced.
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Acknowledgements
This chapter is a revised, updated, and shortened version of an article published in 2008 as ‘Making Alzheimer’s disease matter. Enacting, interfering and doing politics of nature’ in Geoforum 39(1): 98–110. We gratefully acknowledge the permission by Elsevier to reuse the original paper. The study on which the original publication was based was funded by the Norwegian Research Council. It investigated the different and changing versions of Alzheimer’s disease in science, politics, and everyday life practices. It adopted an ethnographic and pluralistic approach to sources and methods of data collection.
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Moser, I. (2016). Making Alzheimer’s Disease Matter: The Politics and Interferences of Different Practices Concerning AD. In: Boenink, M., van Lente, H., Moors, E. (eds) Emerging Technologies for Diagnosing Alzheimer's Disease. Health, Technology and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54097-3_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54097-3_9
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