"Caregivers in the digital space. Self-representation as activism vs social governance”
Résumé
European public health policies, specifically in connection with the ageing of population do not equally constrain all stakeholders. While professional care is financed through taxes in Scandinavia, the highest ratios of family caregivers are observed in Italy and Spain (OECD source). There is therefore no “natural” solution – nor a natural aidance system- but social construction of relevant answers to bring in case of loss of autonomy. Those constructions fall under ideology as defined by Erikson and Telin (2003) - “a set of beliefs about the proper order of a society” - and as any institutional construction, it is based on speech (Searle, 1995).
Involved in a research on the discursive and cultural representation of Alzheimer’s caregivers in France (Accmadial, MSH-CPER Pays de la Loire, supported by the French Institute for Public Health Research), we will proceed, in the context of this communication, a comparative analysis of digital communication by 3 European associations of patients and caregivers, France-Alzheimer in France, la Confederación Española de Alzheimer in Spain and the Alzheimer’s Society in England, through the family caregivers’roles. How do they position themselves through the digital space ? Do they conform with (and reinforce) stereotypes or do they de/reconstruct them, possibly relying on the patients’speech ? From the multi-semiotic device of the last 5 International Days of Alzheimer’s Disease, we will focus on the implemented semantico-discursive mechanisms of objectivation and subjectivation (on which depends the caregivers leeways) by analyzing the modalization of values and summoned forms, within the framework of the Semantics of Argumentative Probabilities (Galatanu, 2017)