Reimagining Dementia Care Beyond the Academy: A Reflexive Doctoral Journey in Nursing Scholarship

Abstract

Dementia continues to be framed widely through narratives of inevitable decline, loss, and social death, contributing to persistent stigma and constraining how care is imagined and delivered. This reflective article draws on my doctoral journey as a nurse scholar to examine how dominant dementia narratives shape assumptions, knowledge production, and engagement with care beyond diagnosis. Rather than reporting empirical findings, I explore how sustained encounters with diverse stories of living with dementia challenged my deficit-oriented assumptions and revealed marginalization of alternative narratives that emphasize continuity, adaptation, and meaning. Drawing on the concept of epistemic injustice, I argue that stigma operates as a narrative system that privileges certain forms of knowledge while silencing others, with implications for nursing practice, education, and community engagement. I conclude by positioning narrative change as a legitimate form of scholarly and ethical intervention and call on
nurses to engage publicly in expanding the lived stories that shape dementia care, equity, and possibility.