The research undertaken with this UKRI FLF award evolves at the boundaries of literary analysis, medical sciences and empirical research, to explore two questions: how does scientific research influence how we think about ageing, and how does culture frame scientific research on ageing and diseases of old age.
Tools of Care
Giving a presentation on the ‘Tools of Care in the Dementia Detective Novel’ at the Ageing, Illness, Care in Cultural and Literary Narrative conference at the University of Huddersfield, September 5-6, 2019.
Conversations on Care and/in the Community
Delighted to have contributed to conversations on Care and/in the Community at Birkbeck in June 2019. For Leah Sidi’s account of the workshop surrounding twenty-first century social and spatial conditions of care, see her post on The Polyphony.
Working Together. Changing Care.
Follow this link to read my reflections on the Dementia, Narrative and Culture Network workshop Working Together, held in Senate House London, 23rd November 2018; published on The Polyphony site, a space for Conversations across the Medical Humanities hosted by Durham University. The post also refers to an interview I conducted with my local project partner, Tony Britton, who launched the Pam Britton Trust for Dementia in Warwickshire (click here for the full interview, hosted on the Trust’s What’s New page).
Creativity in Later Life
Delighted to have been part of the interdisciplinary team that produced Creativity in Later Life: Beyond Late Style (Routledge, 2019), edited by David Amigoni and Gordon McMullan. My contribution explores Terry Pratchett’s documentary ‘Living with Alzheimer’s’, and resists the idea that dementia patients lose their creativity. Among other things, I see creativity expressed in the ways in which patients negotiate with science and scientific discourse related to dementia.
Changing care
Giving a paper at the workshop Working Together: Collaboration beyond the Academy in Research in Dementia and Culture, London, November 23, 2018.
Sharing Tony Britton’s (Pam Britton Trust for Dementia) and my work towards changing dementia care – on how a neuropharmacologist-cum-health-humanist and a caregiver-turned-activist work together to achieve improved caregiver and patient support.
Dementia and the Politics of Memory in Fiction
Giving a presentation on the trajectory from dementia as narrative experiment to the patient as plot device at the ‘Dementia, Violence, and the Politics of Memory in Contemporary Literature, Film, and Comics’ workshop at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, September 13-15, 2018.
Living before Dying. Imagining and Remembering Home.
I have reviewed Janette Davies’s Living before Dying, a book amongst others about the relationship between the patient’s and caregiver’s quality of life in professional care settings, in this week’s Times Higher Education: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/review-living-before-dying-janette-davies-berghahn.
The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing
How do people with Alzheimer’s disease articulate their illness experience? Read more in my post to the King’s College London English Department blog about my new book, The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing, at https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/english/2017/10/04/the-poetics-and-politics-of-alzheimers-disease-life-writing/#more-1132.
L’Alzheimer Fest
I was very interested to read of this Italian initiative of listening to the patient, which took place earlier this month, as featured in the Corriere della Sera.
