DoWell Co-Design Lecture Series 2025-2026: Session 4. Well-making Together

Speaker: Dr Mah Rana, Royal College of Art. Mah is Tutor (Research) at the Royal College of Art and Research Fellow in Language and Cognition at UCL, specialising in phenomenological approaches to lived experience, care and craft within dementia contexts.

Topic: Mah presents findings from a PhD case study using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to understand a daughter’s lived experience of caring for and crafting with her mother, who is living with dementia. The talk discusses how recorded video serves as interview stimulus and how fore-conception (assumptions and prior experiences) shapes retelling. Mah also reflects on how re-engagement through video footage allows participants to reconstruct narratives in their own terms.