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Please Give Gong Gong a Call: A Neurodiverse Lens to Care in Singapore’s Public Housing

Part 2 Dissertation 2023
Lim Kun Yi James
National University of Singapore | Singapore
What emerged from my family’s anxieties in finding a live-in caregiver for my grandfather and the stresses of caring for a loved one amidst neurological decline, the thesis grew into an exploration of drawing the subjective experience of Lewy Body Dementia against the paucity of care spaces in Singaporean public housing infrastructure. Everyday intimate rituals like bathing and mealtime become defamiliarised by visual and auditory hallucinations, changes in mobility and shifting visuospatial cognition, rendering a non-normative body estranged by the home’s immutability.

How does one tell a body is vulnerable if not told? The research methodology engages a method of viscerally rendering traces of domestic rituals and its seepages beyond the home to transcribe the body’s fluctuating condition, providing a lens into neurodiverse worlds. From architectural-medical drawings to ethnographic film and observations, the research anatomises the microworlds of care within the home’s fixity through embodied knowledge of making do in caregiving and the existing gaps between quantitative medical literature, architectural data and the lived affective experience of neurodiverse bodies. In doing so, a productive capital of collective care is made legible in uncovering the inherent leakiness of the home and body, disturbing our atomistic notions of living and caring for one another.

Lim Kun Yi James

Tutor(s)
Lilian Chee
2023
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