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 Making is Connecting by David Gauntlett

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Last year John and I went to Glasgow to see an exhibition of photographs of people with dementia by Cathy Greenblat at Glasgow Caledonian University. There is a branch of John Smith's at the university and, rarely passing the opportunity to go into a bookshop ("What if there is something in there I can't live without?"), we paid a visit. But because the stock seemed mainly about technical subjects we did not expect to find anything of great interest. Oh my goodness - how wrong we were. There really was something in there we couldn't live without!

Although not about people with dementia, Making is Connecting by sociologist David Gauntlett is hugely pertinent to our work in the field of creativity and people with dementia. The connecting is about connecting with oneself (flow?), connecting with physical materials, connecting with other people, and connecting with the wider world. He puts this in a historical context, and talks about the significance of the process of making in a contemporary social and political context. His style is direct and self-effacing.

You can see a short video about these ideas below 
(and there is a lot of other stuff about it online) but I would thoroughly recommend the book itself.







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