Ida Vandsøe Madsen

Short presentation

My research centres on health and illness in Denmark, and I specialise in medical, psychological and phenomenological anthropology. I have worked with topics such as temporality and materiality, memory, trauma, imagination, emotions, embodiment, distance and presence, communication technologies, family and kinship, physical and cognitive differences and disabilities, the inclusion of relatives in state-organized care, care homes, changes in the Danish Welfare State and the Danish care infrastructure, as well as sound and listening as ethnographic methods. I have conducted fieldwork among people with the rare condition osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) and people with dementia and their relatives.

My article-based PhD dissertation, Imaginal Worldbuilding: Dementia and Family Caregiving in Pandemic Denmark (2024), explores how family members of people with dementia in Danish care homes manage to keep on caring in a demanding situation of multiple contingencies: complex and constantly changing dementia symptoms, the exhaustion following the recent reorganisation of the Danish care infrastructure characterised by the inclusion of relatives in state-financed care and, the challenges of caring for a person with dementia across a distance during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The dissertation contributes an analysis of two themes that are becoming increasingly relevant in Denmark and beyond: dementia care and the inclusion of relatives in care. I conducted ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2020-2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, so insights were mainly acquired through sound during telephone and video call conversations with family caregivers. The overall argument of the dissertation is that family members of people with dementia manage to keep on caring in a demanding situation of multiple contingencies by building alternative worlds by means of mental images - or what I term imaginal worldbuilding - and that studying this requires methodological developments that can capture such images. I unfold this in three academic article manuscripts and five framing chapters.

Principal supervisor: Professor Tine Gammeltoft (Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen)

Co-supervisor: Professor Nete Schwennesen (Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University)

Nordea Fonden and the Danish Alzheimer Association fund the project.

As a Teaching Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology, I teach and supervise within general and medical/psychological anthropology and continue my research.

Short presentation