In March 2023, I was invited to deliver a seminar at Trinity College Dublin. The hybrid seminar was part of the Medical and Health Humanities Seminar Series in association with Trinity Long Room Hub. It examined the role of illness in older age in directing self-perceptions and self-representations of ageing as failure, and considered different forms of life narratives and their possibilities and limitations in articulating ageing as a biological reality.
Category Archives: Health Humanities
Engaging with Government Programme
In February 2023, I attended the brilliant Engaging with Government Programme run by the Institute for Government and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council; invaluable for reflecting on opportunities for arts and humanities researchers to inform policy making.
Interview about the UKRI FLF Scheme
Follow this link for an interview with the King’s Arts and Sciences Research Office Bulletin, in which I shared information about the UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship scheme.
Lifelong Ageing
Our Lifelong Ageing workshop as part of SAACY brings together ECRs taking a lifecourse perspective of ageing with interested participants from local and national charities and third sector organisations. Check out our call for papers.
‘Exhausting, frustrating and lonely’
In July this year, the Founder Trustee of the Pam Britton Trust for Dementia in Warwickshire, Tony Britton, and I had a joint paper published in the journal Dementia: the international journal of social research and practice. Here’s the press release about the paper.
Literature and Dementia Care
The title of the plenary lecture I delivered at the Symposium on Ethics, Agency, and Personhood in Dementia at the University of Southern Denmark, Copenhagen, in August 2022, reflecting on how particular genres, narrative perspectives and tropes may or may not be productive for an enabling approach to the person with dementia and their care. Great to join Marlene Goldman, Ina Kjogx Pedersen and Peter Simonsen for a panel discussion, moderated by Cindie Maagaard, on the use of narrative medicine in dementia care.
The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth
In a guest post for the Science and Policy Blog of the Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy I reflect on diverging perspectives on ageing, motivations behind SAACY and recent work with third sector project partners.
Psychological Humanities and Narrative Medicine
In July 2022, contributed to the Summer School at the University of Trento, reflecting with students on the role of dementia in bestselling fiction, particularly exploring aspects of care and family relationships.
Informal Dementia Care
An analysis produced by the Founder Trustee of the Pam Britton Trust for Dementia in Warwickshire and myself of the informal dementia care situation in England and beyond. Published in Dementia: the international journal of social research and practice, the piece critically reflects on contemporary policy issues related to dementia care and proposes actions for change. Thanks to funding from UK Research and Innovation this paper is available open access.
The Normal and the Pathological in Old Age
An invited guest lecture at the meeting of the Versus Arthritis Musculoskeletal Disorders Research Advisory Group, reflecting on arthritis as compared to dementia in cultural discourse, including representations in literary texts and focus in scientific and medical writing.
Martina Zimmermann 