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.
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.
Ageing, Dementia, Care
A talk at the Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy on how a different perspective on ageing may inform care policy. Read here a summary of the seminar.
From a ‘care-free’ distance?
A book chapter on how adult sons perceive of themselves as they confront their parent’s older age and memory loss, reading Michele Farina’s Quando andiamo a casa? (2015), Jonathan Taylor’s Take Me Home (2007) and Nick Taylor’s A Necessary End (1994). In the open access essay collection Ageing Masculinities, Alzheimer’s and Dementia Narratives (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), edited by Heike Hartung, Rüdiger Kunow and Matthew Sweney.
Dementia and the Politics of Memory in Fiction
A book chapter on Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia and their deployment in fiction: from narrative experiment to the patient as plot device. In: The Politics of Dementia: Forgetting and Remembering the Violent Past in Literature, Film and Graphic Narratives (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2022 – open access), edited by Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff, Nina Schmidt and Sue Vice.
A conversation on ageing
…together with Sridhar Venkatapuram (Global Health Institute, King’s College London), in a series of cross-college seminars hosted by the Centre for Humanities and Health, King’s College London.
Interdependent narratives: dementia in science, medicine and literature of the long 20th century
A keynote delivered at Amnesie d’autore: 1920-2020, un secolo di parole per raccontare l’amnesia, an international conference about memory loss at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy, 23-25 September 2021.
Foucault for Physicists
An invited seminar on ‘Discipline and Power in Cross-Faculty Teaching’, including reflections on the module Science in Context, which I had developed at the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL), when working at the University of Warwick.
Martina Zimmermann 