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A new book, co-edited by a ¹ú²úÊÓƵ academic, aims to help people living with dementia to continue to enjoy leisure activities.

The book, Leisure and Everyday Life with Dementia, challenges readers to consider the role of leisure activities beyond their potential for therapeutic benefit and emphasises how leisure offers people living with dementia an opportunity to feel normality and a continuation of everyday life. It also explores the role of society in enabling this through giving equal chances to make choices about how, when and where people participate.

The book has been edited by Dr Chris Russell, Senior Lecturer in the ¹ú²úÊÓƵ’s Association for Dementia Studies, along with Dr Karen Gray, who completed her PhD at the Association for Dementia Studies and is now a researcher at the University of Bristol, and Jane Twigg, who is herself living with dementia. Jane’s vision of leisure as life-enhancing and open to all people living with dementia as a right has guided its creation.

Dr Chris Russell, whose PhD centred on leisure and dementia, said: “This is the first time that an edited collection has been brought together to examine this topic. Contributors from multiple disciplines discuss areas including sports, arts and culture, travel, nature, and the online world.

“Chapters unpick the diverse implications for care and provision of dementia and leisure services, for research, and for society more generally. They present frameworks for understanding leisure opportunities in research and recommendations for implementing them in practice.”

The book is aimed at anyone whose study or work in nursing or social care, occupational therapy, social work, arts therapies, arts, health and wellbeing, sports and exercise, or gerontology, includes an interest in dementia.

It includes an accessible summary and a ‘what does this mean in practice?’ section at the end of each chapter. The book is being published by Open University Press and will hit the shelves in August.