Race, ethnicity and culture: Problematic application in dementia and old age

Population ageing, globalisation and migration have brought to the forefront of dementia research the ageing and health of ethnocultural minoritised people as ‘a group’ at greater risk of poor dementia outcomes. The presence of health and ageing inequalities, which continues to cluster around race and ethnicity in newly acquired conditions, such as COVID-19, as in older ones, compels us to examine how scholarship and research in ageing attend to race, ethnicity and culture in health and dementia research. Calls for greater investment and innovative approaches to address inequalities in dementia are frequently made, yet health and gerontological research remain tainted by the use of problematic epistemological starting points wherein race and/or ethnicity, as lenses through which determinations about populations are made, are problematised, essentialised and characterised as deficit when selectively applied to minoritised groups. This chapter provides a critical commentary on how scholarship makes sense of race, ethnicity and culture in dementia research, how usage of these constructs as biological and cultural explanations for differences, distinctions and disparities supports racialised practices that problematise the dementia experiences of minoritised communities. It shows that the fashioning of dementia in minoritised communities as a problem in need of resolution through culture correction needs to change if dementia research is to benefit these communities. Scholars have a vital role to play in recalibrating dementia enquiries to attend to race, ethnicity and culture in ways that do not perpetuate health and social inequalities.