A place like this? Stories of dementia, home, and the self.

The connections between home and the self have been the subject of debate in recent years. As a metaphor for a bounded and stable identity, the ideal of home is regarded as dangerous by theorists who oppose a politics based on nostalgic appeals to unity and privilege. Home is criticised as an exclusionary and depoliticising space. Scholars such as Iris Marion Young and Geraldine Pratt argue, however, that we should be wary of rejecting home, since the material space of home provides valuable support for individual and collective narratives of identity. In this paper I reflect on these debates in the light of my father's experience of dementia and the move from his own home into residential care. I examine alternatives to the account of identity on which critiques of home as exclusionary space are based, such as narrative identities and Jessica Benjamin's intersubjective approach to the self and the concrete other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]