Differentially Shared Experience in Life with Dementia: Interworldly Phenomena, Normality and World-Open Care

This article addresses the underexplored ontological role of worldhood in dementia care, arguing that prevailing models of person-centered care insufficiently account for the worldly conditions that constitute personhood. Building on phenomenological analyses, it introduces the concept of differentially shared experience through an examination of interworldly phenomena in life with dementia. Drawing on empirical narratives of caregiving, the paper shows how otherwise pathologized experiences may become meaningfully shared across different experiential horizons, giving rise to interworldly fields of possible experience. The analysis engages Husserl’s account of the constitutive role of normality in the formation of the shared world, demonstrating how such frameworks risk excluding people with dementia. In response, the article proposes a phenomenological reorientation that interrupts implicit norms of perceptual validity, allowing for the recognition of dimensions of experience that would otherwise be disqualified as pathological. Interworldly experience is thus conceptualized as both shared and irreducibly differential, grounded in intercorporeal relations that reconfigure the fields of possible experience. The article concludes by outlining the care ethical implications of this framework, introducing world-open care and positive situation work as practices that engage directly with the situated, affective, and relational constitution of shared worlds. These approaches expand dementia care beyond interpersonal interaction toward a generative engagement with the conditions of the worldly situatedness of co-existence.