It’s been a while since our last update and so we want to bring you up to speed with the project. Back in February we were invited by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter to talk about our research. As well as presenting initial findings we also … Continue reading August 2022 update
End of year round up!
As a new year approaches, we reflect on the ups, downs and everything-in-between of the project so far...
Speculative Fiction and the Future of Older Age
In On the Writing of Speculative Fiction (1947), Robert A. Heinlein describes the genre as: ‘[N]arratives concerned not so much with science or technology as with human actions in response to a new situation created by science or technology, speculative fiction highlights a human rather than technological problem’. Authors have used this malleable genre (which encompasses elements of fantasy, science fiction, utopia/dystopia, horror … Continue reading Speculative Fiction and the Future of Older Age
On putting the ‘act’ into active participant
Back in April Val wrote about using forum theatre as a method to reimagine the future in older age. Forum theatre, she noted, allows performers and audience members to ‘actively participate’ in order to encourage critical reflection and rehearse strategies of resistance to challenge oppression and marginalisation. In this post I reflect on how I … Continue reading On putting the ‘act’ into active participant
What’s ‘new’ & team updates…
At the start of July, we said farewell to Valerie, who is now based at the University of Glasgow, and hello to Jade, who joins us from Queen Mary, University of London where she recently finished her PhD. Jade tells us a bit more about joining the project and her work – We all have stories to tell … Continue reading What’s ‘new’ & team updates…
What do we mean by ‘self-identified’ older adult
In our previous blog post, we announced that we’re recruiting ‘self-identified’ older people to take part in an online theatre workshop. The term ‘self-identified’ seems to have ruffled some feathers, and so this is a response in good faith which hopefully answers some questions. Researchers of older age and later life have always had to … Continue reading What do we mean by ‘self-identified’ older adult
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
We’ve now completed our first round of reading group discussions. We wanted to let you know which books we’ve been reading and give you a flavour of where our discussions have taken us. In this post I’ll discuss The Summer Book (1972) by Tove Jansson. Tove Jansson (1914-2001) was a Finnish writer who is most well-known for … Continue reading The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
Why we need to reimagine the future
This is not the introductory blog post we had planned to write. It’s not the blog post we would have written in January, when the project started, or what we would have written last month, last week, or even yesterday. COVID-19 has intruded into every aspect of our lives and we find ourselves striving to … Continue reading Why we need to reimagine the future