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.
Tag Archives: dementia
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
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.
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.
REMIND: Esperienze e memorie reali nella cura
Delighted to have been invited to contribute the concluding remarks, ‘L’esperienza dell’Alzheimer: una vista differenziata e collettiva’ [The full view of the lived experience of Alzheimer’s disease], to a study on ‘Real experiences and memories in care: Narrating dementia in Alzheimer’s disease’, led by Maria Giulia Marini at ISTUD, Milan. This study brings together three perspectives, that of people with a diagnosis of dementia, that of their family members and that of healthcare professionals. In bringing these voices together, this study and the book resulting from it establish the framework for an ‘ecosystem’ for the wellbeing of all involved, based on the principle that each party learns of the others’ anxieties, limitations, aspirations and hopes in the confrontation with dementia.
Making Ageing and Dementia Studies Matter outside the Academy
At the 8th Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellows Conference, one of the panels focused on ‘Developing careers in the arts and humanities’. I contributed with a presentation that explored tensions between research, and impact and engagement activities, based on my experiences of currently running a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship funded research programme on ageing, The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth.
SAACY Lifelong Ageing conference 17th May 2023
A rewarding day of conversations across sectors and disciplines about ageing as a lifelong process. Thanks to Camille Aubry for this illustration of a productive SAACY conference at Science Gallery London.
Books Beyond Words book launch
A pleasure to attend the Books Beyond Words book launch held by Baroness Hollins at the House of Lords. Books Beyond Words are picture stories that help people with learning disabilities explore feelings and experiences. Look out for the charity’s BBC Radio 4 Appeal on Easter Sunday.
Life Narratives and the Biological Reality of Ageing
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. You can listen to a podcast of the seminar following this link.
Martina Zimmermann 