A great pleasure to have joined a panel at the Annual Conference of the Foundation for Science and Technology to discuss one of the five missions of the newly elected government. Topics covered seniority and mentoring, opportunities for older people in the workforce and more.
Author Archives: Martina Zimmermann
Save the date for the 2025 Conference of SLSAeu, European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, 4-6 June 2025
SAACY will host the 2025 SLSAeu annual conference, ‘The Lifespan: Perspectives on Ageing and the Life Course from the Medical Humanities, the Health Sciences and Age Studies’.
The three-day conference will be held at King’s College London. We hope to provide limited hybrid options with a strong preference for papers to be presented in person. We are keen to foster conversations across disciplines within individual panels, encouraging contributions on lifespan/lifecourse approaches to ageing from disciplines such as Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Dementia Studies, Disability Studies, Epidemiology, Evolutionary Science and Medicine, Gender Studies, Geriatrics, Gerontology, Health Economics, Languages and Literatures, Narrative Medicine, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Postgenomic Sciences, Psychiatry, and Public Health.
The Call for Papers and further information on fees and bursaries will be circulated soon.
Confirmed plenary speakers and round table discussants include:
Sally Chivers, Trent University, Canada
Ulrike Draesner, Leipzig University, Germany
Des O’Neill, Trinity College Dublin, Republic of Ireland
Susan Pickard, University of Liverpool, UK
Oliver Robinson, Imperial College London, UK
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Columbia University, USA
Aagje Swinnen, Maastricht University, Netherlands
Panel Discussion on Literature and Science
Delighted to have been invited to contribute to the panel discussion on the online day of the International Conference of Three Societies on Literature and Science, on ‘Literature and Science: The State of the Field’, hosted by John Holmes and chaired by Lara Choksey, discussing with the Founding Chair of BSLS, Alice Jenkins, and Lecturer in Science Communication, Meghan Judge. Great to deliberate on challenge-led funding and on how the humanities can influence policy.
SAACY at InCommon
Delighted to have been invited to speak at an InCommon Lunch and Learn event about the Policy Report, Shifting How We View the Ageing Process, which summarises the Themes for Actions and Next Steps explored during a Policy Lab held in the framework of my research programme on The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth, funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.
Cognitive Augmentation in Speculative Writing
Delighted about the opportunity to present at the International Conference of Three Societies on Literature and Science at Birmingham, contributing to the panel on ‘Facing Mortality’ with reflections on anti-ageing discourse at the boundaries between predictive popular science and creative science fiction.
Overcoming decline (in) narrative
My contribution to the Literature and Medicine collection by Anna Elsner and Monika Pietrzak-Franger, ‘Overcoming decline (in) narrative: Episodicity in dementia and ageing’, explores how the culturally and medically prized concept of narrative influences pessimism about ageing. The chapter takes three steps. It reviews seminal texts in the Medical Humanities to illustrate how signature characteristics of narrative dominate cultural and medical expectations of how people experience themselves and think about their lives. Taking dementia as a situation where anxieties about ageing and continuity of self are particularly acute, it illustrates the pressure emanating from narrativity for life as lived and life as narrated, revealing episodicity as a viable response to this two-fold pressure. In looking at the life histories of older people, gathered by in-depth unstructured interviews and published in book-format, this contribution demonstrates that episodicity is hugely relevant also for how older people retrospectively pitch their lives, suggesting that mid-life anxieties about living along a prescribed narrative arc into old age are perhaps exaggerated.
Foundation Future Leaders 2024
Delighted to have been accepted on the Foundation Future Leaders programme 2024 organised by the Foundation of Science and Technology. The programme brings together a cohort of around 30 mid-career professionals, with ten representatives each from the research community, industry and the public sector, including the civil service.
Keynote at GSA Ireland
In December 2023, I was invited to deliver the opening keynote at the annual conference of the German Studies Association of Ireland, which focused on the Medical Humanities this year. My talk explored the nexus between the culturally and medically prized concept of narrative and a culturally prevalent account of ageing as decline and loss.
SAACY at Age UK
Delighted to have been invited to speak at the Age UK Influencing Division Briefing about the Policy Report, Shifting How We View the Ageing Process, which summarises the Themes for Actions and Next Steps explored during a Policy Lab held in the framework of my research programme on The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth, funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.
SAACY at Centre for Ageing Better
Delighted to have been invited to speak at Ageing Better Headquarters about our Policy Report, Shifting How We View the Ageing Process. The Report summarises findings from the one-day workshop that explored the value, feasibility and acceptability of shifting how we view the ageing process. The Report’s goal is to achieve attitudinal change to ageing, by moving away from a narrative of disease and decline towards the idea that ageing is a lifelong process of change.
Martina Zimmermann 