Interactions between Cognitive Impairment & Transport in Urban Environments (IN-CITU)

Novel social and cognitive science, approaching people and places as indivisible assemblages, challenges dementia research’s traditional humanism (people as exceptional entities) and neuroreductionism (brains as cognitive supercomputers).

However, these traditional ideas permeate current “dementia- friendly” strategies, positing that agentic persons inhabit inactive spaces.

Resulting initiatives assume that architectural refinement will maximise individuals’ intrinsic cognitive capacities, overlooking the complex distribution of cognition throughout evolving atmospheric spaces. They often lack user perspectives and sophisticated theoretical grounding.

In response, I will combine cutting-edge scholarships to explore cognition-environment relations through a sensory ethnography of Manchester’s public transport, a target for dementia-friendly initiatives.

I will accompany 25 passengers with dementia, documenting the journeys through interviewing, fieldnotes, photography and mapping. Participants will capture photographs and videos for an exhibition across the transport network.

The exceptionally rich dataset, comprised of audio-visual media, sensory ethnographic data and maps, will be made available to future researchers.

The project will challenge outdated assumptions in dementia research and policy, developing proposals for improving each. It aligns with policy priorities and will propose service improvements in collaboration with key stakeholders.

It will generate an unprecedented open-access dataset for analysing dementia-friendliness and cognition-environment relations, and pioneer methods for inclusive ecological dementia research.