Prof. Dr. Annette Leibing
Projects & Publications
The future is generally conceived as based on a linear conception of time (past-present-future). In many societies, this includes a preventive logic, namely that responsible citizens take care of their future by, for instance, adopting healthy habits or taking out insurance. What about people who reject the future? I will study members of two groups who question the idea of the future: punks and Jehovah's Witnesses. These groups adhere respectively to the notions of “no future” and “the end of the world.” As a consequence, members of both groups often have little education, are less healthy than others, and have more difficulties as they age. My methods will include narrative interviews with members of both groups with a special focus on ageing members (50+), combined with ethnographic data (observations) about meeting spaces. Juxtaposing data from these two groups not only provides important insights into how rejecting the future impacts concretely on lives, but it might also contribute to important theoretical discussions on uncommon temporalities touching several academic disciplines.
Dementia (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease) affects 50 million people around the world. For many years, dementia prevention has been a somewhat nebulous notion of “brain training” (e.g., doing crossword puzzles as you age). In 2017, however, Lancet Report authors claimed that one in three cases could be prevented if nine (in 2020: 12) risk factors were addressed: education, hypertension, obesity, hearing loss, smoking, depression, physical inactivity, social isolation, and diabetes. Further factors include alcohol consumption, traumatic brain injury, and air pollution.
\tMost preventive public health campaigns target the individual (“don’t smoke”), although most of the new risk factors are societal in nature (access to health care, access to healthy food, etc.); and a number of studies have shown that in countries where individuals have access to good health care and education, dementia rates went down over time. This project focuses on our changing understanding of prevention (including early detection) in conceptualizing dementia. I will analyze different aspects of prevention: historical, national (in Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Brazil), the translation of science discourses in the media, etc. Multi-site ethnographies will further allow us to study prevention in practice. This juxtaposition of perspectives should help us to avoid simplifications when making recommendations and prescriptions.