This short film is a co-production with Reuben &Co (and animations by Camille Aubry) arising from The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth (SAACY). SAACY project partners featuring in this film are Age UK, Brixton Windmill, Centre for Ageing Better, and InCommon. Rethinking Ageing was filmed on location, at Lambeth Town Assembly Hall, in November 2024.
Tag Archives: ageing
An Agenda for the Medical Humanities and Ageing
Embedded in a historical account of the relation of the medical humanities to ageing, and an account of the history of age studies, this article asserts that the medical humanities need to invest their discipline-crossing capacity and knowledge base in ageing. They need to integrate the biological reality of ageing into their descriptive practices and accept biomedicine as a constructive agent in their future work on ageing. Published in the journal History of the Human Sciences, the article is available open access.
Shifting Representations of Ageing in the Media
Our second SAACY Policy Report, Shifting Representations of Ageing in Advertising, the Media, and the Creative Industries, is published! We identify opportunity for media content to be more intergenerational, and for it to be developed by age-diverse teams, and we list systemic opportunities for change, drawing upon regulation, funding, data and education-based strategies. The report was launched in the House of Lords on 13 May 2025, hosted by The Rt Hon. The Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, co-chair of the APPG for Ageing and Older People.
Lifelines: Rethinking Ageing across Generations
A free exhibition at Science Gallery London, invites people of all ages to consider ageing as a lifelong process, rather than a phase of decline that happens towards the end of life. Open 29 May until 2 August 2025.
Offering an open space for conversations across generations and complete with film, objects, photographs and animations highlighting our shared human experiences, Lifelines prompts the visitor to address how inequalities impact health and quality of life in older age, and to consider what we can learn from one another. It assures us that together, we can creatively rethink ageing, embracing and preparing for the challenges, joys, and surprises of getting older.
Literature and Science Forum
Delighted to have been invited to speak in the Winter Series: Medical and Digital Humanities of the Literature and Science Forum – about a narrative approach to changing how we think about ageing.
Breaking down barriers to opportunity
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.
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
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.
Martina Zimmermann 