ADLab Webinar: My memory returned to me. Writing about dementia from a queer-feminist perspective (Teri Szűcs, Researcher and Writer, Hungary)

Teri Szűcs will give a talk on her autobiographical series titled 'My Memory Returned to Me'. Time and place: June 16, 2023 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM CET, Zoom

Abstract

In my talk, I plan to involve the notions of co-authoring, co-creation and translation in the context of dementia care, and to describe the caring relationship as an interaction through which personhood and the narratives of the self can be rehabilitated and rebuilt. This applies to the position of the caregiver just as much as to that of the care receiver. Being both a caregiver and a literary worker, I am interested in mobilizing the potentials of literature to enhance co-creativity on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to reflect on the dynamics within the caring relationship. I would like to relate this to my multilingual autobiographical writing project titled “My Memory Returned to Me”, and to share how, in the time of the “illness of forgetting”, family memories can be co-authored. I am convinced that in the case of dementia, the claim of the transactional model of selfhood gains new relevance: that personhood is performative, continuously evolving and shaped through the interpersonal exchange. I am interested in understanding the role of literature – text, narrative creation, language – in this wide plane of the performative.

Bio

Teri Szűcs is a researcher and writer from Hungary. Szűcs originally specialized in the fields of Holocaust Studies and Hungarian Romani literature. Over the past half-decade she has been involved in dementia home care. She has started writing her autobiographical series titled “My Memory Returned to Me” to collect and recount the experiences and adventures of caring for her mother. “My Memory Returned to Me” is a multilingual writing project that aims to describe the caring relationship as a joint endeavour to remember, to learn and to change. It involves diasporic positions and identites – also as a manifestation of how the caring relationship rearranges fixed positionalities. Szűcs has also started her theoretical inquiry into the multiple functions of art in the context of dementia care. She is interested in the queering aspect of the intimacy of care, that is, in its potential to deconstruct normative relations and redefine affinities. Szűcs's inquiry also encompasses the political aspects of care and gives an account of its crisis from an Eastern European queer feminist point of view.

Panelists

The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion with:

Ann Therese Lotherington: Professor in social sciences researching how to promote interaction and integration in society without standardizing ways of living.

Contact

Please contact Lilli Mittner if you have any questions. 

Organizer 

Artful Dementia Research Lab