In this chapter, we investigate how a couple where one of the spouses is diagnosed with dementia handle challenges in narrations of past shared events that arise when the spouse with dementia has limited access to these events. Partners of people diagnosed with dementia recurrently have to take into consideration that their spouse may not remember details in stories they tell, even though the person with dementia is a main participant in the events being retold. The design of such stories is complex as the interactants must keep track of both the content of the story and manage the potential sensitivity of telling a story that should already be known to both spouses. We show how the spouse without dementia (re)organizes the participation framework in resourceful ways and delicately deals with her spouse’s limited memory using a variety of face-saving practices. The analyses highlight how issues related to knowledge and dementia can benefit from using an interactional and distributed perspective. While access and rights to knowledge is usually divided between participants depending on the knowledge domain and the participants’ relation to the topic, in the case of a dementia disease a more flexible approach towards such divisions could be advantageous.

This study deals with assessment as an interactional practice in assisted eating activities involving people with late-stage dementia (here Alzheimer’s disease) in an elderly care home. The dataset for the study consists of video recordings of 26 occasions of eating activities. We investigate the use of embodied, vocal and verbal assessments (e.g., headshakes, nods and gustatory ‘mmm’) together with evaluative terms (e.g., ‘good’ or ‘great’) in three consecutive phases in these activities: ‘introducing the mealtime activity’, ‘offering the food’ and ‘receiving the food’. Drawing on multimodal analysis of interaction, we analyze three mealtime events, in which we show how assessments are issued by caregivers more often in interaction with a person with dementia who appears less engaged in the activity compared to a more engaged resident. Moreover, the analysis explicates how assessments fit in with the overall organization of the activity and are issued in a timely fashion when the food is introduced and brought close to the lips of the person with dementia, and when it is accepted. The findings show that assessments are used not only to share an evaluation of e.g., food or the action of the person with dementia, but also to manage the assisted eating activity. Assessments seem to be used distinctively (1) to build joint attention in the eating activity and (2) to encourage the assisted person to submit to/continue the activity of eating.

In this article, we argue that investigating and learning about agentive abilities of people living with late-stage dementia requires a theoretical framework that focuses on the use of bodily resources in interpersonal interaction (i.e., intercorporeality) for performing joint activities rather than on solely the use of spoken language. Assisted eating, which involves people living with late-stage dementia and professional carers, is taken as an empirical example. The study is based on observations and video recordings of occasions of assisted eating involving five people with late-stage dementia in a residential elder care home; one of these people is used as an example in this paper. The analysis shows that assisted eating is performed as a joint intercorporeal activity. The participants create joint attentional space and a common space of action for their bodily movements when they give and receive food. The participants engaged in the activity coordinate their bodily moves with each other. The analysis (1) demonstrates that the collaboration between people living with late-stage dementia and nurses is based on practical interdependent and co-operative bodily actions. (2) This makes it possible to better understand agency in terms of intercorporeal interaction displayed by people living with late-stage dementia. (3) The agency demonstrated in intercorporeal interaction is thus considered to be shared and distributed across bodies and requires support to be interactionally achieved. (4) The intercorporeal interaction as grounds for agency not only calls on other participants to note and honor the agency of the person with dementia that is still evident in embodied interaction, but also invites others to support people with dementia to claim and display their agency in social interactions and joint activities.

This study explores how manners of mediation, and the use of embodiment in interpreter-mediated conversation have an impact on tests of cognitive functioning in a dementia evaluation. By a detailed analysis of video recordings, we show how participants—an occupational therapist, an interpreter, and a patient—use embodied practices to make the tasks of a test of cognitive functioning intelligible, and how participants collaboratively put the instructions of the tasks into practice. We demonstrate that both instructions and instructed actions—and the whole procedure of accomplishing the tasks—are shaped co-operatively by embodied practices of all three participants involved in the test situation. Consequently, the accomplishment of the tasks should be viewed as the outcome of a collaborative achievement of instructed actions, rather than an individual product. The result of the study calls attention to issues concerning interpretations of, and the reliability of interpreter-mediated tests and their bearings for diagnostic procedures in dementia evaluations.

This study is about teachers’ responsive matching gestures in small instructing/learning projects in Swedish as a second language classes. Matching gestures are those gestures that are similar, if not identical, to those in the prior turns-at-talk. The focus of this study is on the repeated gestures, which are used, among other practical purposes, as teaching devices. They are examined in different sequence types such as correction, reformulation and explanation sequences. The data used for this study is a collection of excerpts extracted from the video recordings of teacher-student conversations. An ethnomethodological / conversation analytic framework is adapted for examining the phenomenon. The multimodal analysis of the excerpts shows that matching gestures in language learning situations have a double function. They are used for maintaining and sustaining intersubjectivity, and also for constructing teachable moments as well as learning opportunities. They are used as tying devices to connect teachers’ actions to the students’ prior actions, and are resources for the display of interactive coengagements and strong co-participations. Moreover, matching gestures are used as teaching devices indicating lapses in the competence of the students demonstrated in their verbal productions. The teachers employ matching gestures along with some  verbal affiliates, when the matching gestures are crucial parts of the teachers’ contributions foregrounding the verbal forms as substitutes or remedial proposal for (enhancing) the students’ utterances. That is, matching gestures are used in second language learning situations for proffering learnables through highlighting an alternative way of telling and exhibiting in that language.