Natashe Lemos Dekker is the winner of the first Interdem Academy Publication Award. The article Anticipating an Unwanted Future: Euthanasia and Dementia in the Netherlands” was part of her doctoral research and is published open access in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI).
In this article Lemos Dekker theorizes from a social scientific perspective how people with dementia and their family members anticipate the future by requesting euthanasia. It discusses how images of dementia feature in their expectations of the future and motivate them to request euthanasia, and looks in detail at how they prepare, as well as defer this request in negotiation with medical professionals. The article demonstrates, further, that the biomedical and legal frames of euthanasia are socially navigated, stressing that requesting euthanasia with dementia is not an individual but a collective process. These analytical contributions are conveyed through stories, allowing the voices and experiences of people with dementia and their relatives to form the core of this article. This resonates closely with the Interdim mission to involve people with dementia and their networks in research.