"Do Not Allow Me to Forget You": Daughter Care, Dementia, and Curriculum in the Moment

• In Event: Rethinking Curriculum and Pedagogies Through Feminist Praxis

Abstract

This paper explores and performs the ways daughters make meaning of the lived curriculum of their experience of their mothers’ dementia. U.S. daughters disproportionally carry the burden of caring for mothers with dementia (Bath, 2017). Rabin (2017) writes, “As Washington debates the relative merits of health care legislation, many families have already come up with what is arguably the most reliable form of care in America: It’s called daughter care” (p. 1). This paper performs interwoven narratives of daughter care that bear witness to curriculum lived in the sweet epistemological now of our mothers’ memories as a form of aesthetic resistance to master narratives of medicalized decline that define the experience of dementia exclusively in terms of loss.

Authors

• Laura M. Jewett, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

• Zulema Williams, Los Fresnos Consolidated Independent School District