The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth (SAACY+3)

Context and Challenge: Cultural pessimism about ageing endangers all facets of intergenerational solidarity; it shapes perceptions of the worth and value of human beings and directs decisions about care, research and funding priorities. The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth (SAACY) offers a conceptual framework with which to overcome such cultural pessimisms and influence policy change. It pursues two questions: how does culture frame the questions and paradigms of leading researchers in ageing and diseases of old age? And how do scientific research developments act as cultural force; how do they influence societal approaches to dementia? Driven by the PI’s dual career path between the life/medical sciences and the health humanities, SAACY has striven to answer these questions by reaching across disciplines and sectors. Her literary scholarship has explored the dynamic conversation between scientific, medical and wider cultural discourses about ageing across the 20th century; qualitative work investigates older people’s experiences; and in partnering with national/local charities, SAACY involves older people in transforming wider societal attitudes to ageing. An engagement programme has already attracted attention from the third sector and other representatives of the policy world to SAACY’s first policy report, and a second policy lab will formulate a manifesto to build a coalition across the private, public and third sectors.
Aims and Objectives: SAACY+3 expands on the research, impact and training enabled by SAACY, seeking to consolidate the PI’s position as a leading researcher in the health humanities with specialism in dementia and ageing, while focusing resources on maximizing SAACY’s potential to achieve attitudinal changes to ageing. It has three objectives:
O+31. to pioneer a model for how humanities-led research (archival and co-produced) can inform policy and practice, especially attitudinal change to ageing at midlife, through working with creative industries. SAACY+3 seeks to maximize SAACY’s impact to achieve attitudinal changes to ageing by targeting people aged 40 to 65. The main conduit for this will be the production, distribution and impact campaign of a not-for-profit feature film based on SAACY research.
O+32. to explore non-mainstream narratives about ageing in ways that challenge decline and successful ageing narratives alike. This new research will lead to a generally accessible short book, ‘Fixing How We View Ageing’, targeted at general readers and health and social care policy makers, as its messages chime with major national and international agendas on healthy ageing.
O+33. to investigate the divides between approaches to ageing and dementia of the life/medical sciences as compared to the social sciences and humanities; to formulate a funding bid for a project on the myths and realities of the two-culture split that harnesses the PI’s expertise of working across disciplines and leads by developing science literacy in the academy and beyond.
Potential applications and benefits: Resonating with the World Health Organisation Decade of Healthy Ageing baseline report, that healthy ageing will only be achieved if we ‘change how we think, feel and act towards age and ageing’, SAACY has already taken significant steps towards informing practices and policy development. A shift in attitudinal change to ageing especially at midlife would have far-reaching implications for how we retire, treat and care for older people, fund research and care, and understand intergenerational relations. SAACY+3 will contribute to the conversation about how we can live healthier and happier lives even as we age.