Duties to Care Dementia, Relationality and Law Cambridge Studies in Law and Society Series

The world of dementia care can be a difficult one for carers to navigate, posing new challenges at every stage from diagnosis to end of life. In her ground-breaking investigation, rooted in original empirical data, Rosie Harding explores the regulatory and legal dimensions of caring for a person with dementia. By exploring carers' experiences of dementia care, she critiques the limitations of current approaches to health and social care regulation. This socio-legal work is a new contribution to the study of feminist care ethics, relationality, and vulnerability theory. Duties to Care argues that by understanding the relational contexts that shape everyday experiences of regulatory structures, we will better understand where law is operating to support carers, and where it adds to the difficulties they experience. Ultimately, the challenges that dementia poses will be addressed only if we find solutions that take account of the relationality of life, dementia, and law.

1. Introducing Duties to Care; 2. Vulnerability, relationality and the challenge of dementia for law; 3. Carers in law and society; 4. Planning for the future in the early stages of dementia; 5. Navigating life with dementia; 6. Complaints and complaining about health and social care; 7. Death and dying with and of dementia; 8. Carers' emotional, social and material investments; 9. Conclusions: relational duties to care.

Rosie Harding is Chair in Law and Society at the University of Birmingham, a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow, and Chair of the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA). Her research focuses on the everyday regulation and legal recognition of intimate and caring relationships. Her first monograph, Regulating Sexuality (2011), won the 2011 SLSA-Hart Book Prize and SLSA-Hart Early Career Prize. She is editor of Law and Sexuality (2016), and co-editor of Ageing and Sexualities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2016) and Revaluing Care in Theory, Law and Politics: Cycles and Connections (2017).