The lecture delivered by Anamarija Kejžar as part of the Inspire Research Series @ FSAS, on May 26, 2025, titled: Dementia, Care and Social Innovation in a Long-Lived Society offered a profoundly anti-mainstream perspective on dementia, combining theoretical reflection with numerous examples drawn from professional practice, institutional management, research, and international projects. For almost an hour and a half, her intense and conceptually rich presentation explored dementia not through an exclusively medicalised or decline-oriented lens, but through a proactive, participatory, and person-centred approach.
A central thread of the lecture was the idea that people living with dementia should not be reduced to diagnosis or symptom, but understood through their biographies, relationships, environments, and everyday needs. In this sense, Anamarija Kejžar emphasized that every care plan should begin with the person’s life story and aim to preserve autonomy, familiarity, meaning, and quality of life, including through non-pharmacological activities, stimulating environments, and relational forms of validation.
The presentation also critically addressed the limits of many contemporary dementia initiatives, including the risk of tokenism in participatory projects and the tendency to speak about people with dementia without genuinely including them in decision-making, research, or community life. At a deeper level, the lecture articulated a subtle form of empowerment both for people living with dementia and for the social work profession itself: not as a passive executor of procedures, but as an active force capable of coordinating, innovating, and transforming institutions, care practices, and communities.
A particularly moving moment of the event was the presentation of excerpts from her documentary film Don’t Forget Me, dedicated to the lives of people with dementia living in residential care settings. The film complemented the academic dimension of the lecture with a deeply human perspective on vulnerability, patience, relationships, and dignity in dementia care.
