Late-life Creativity and the 'new old age': Arts & Humanities and Gerontology in Critical Dialogue

The UK's population is ageing, and this demographic trend poses challenges and opportunities for our societies and the knowledge economies that serve them. A key topic, we believe, is creativity and specifically late-life creativity. Our primary set of questions is: what is 'late-life creativity'? How might we define it? And in what ways is it different from creativity at earlier phases of life? We will explore these questions by bringing together scholars in arts and humanities and in critical gerontology, along with creative artists and performers, social care practitioners, and older people. The network will be shaped by four themed workshops focused on: identity and discipline; 'late style'; memory; and community.

In recent years, gerontologists have explored new lifestyles in later life and their implications for understanding community and well-being; while in literature and theatre, art history, and music, there has been a critical focus on the limitations of common understandings of old age in the assessment of late-life creative output - there has, for instance, been a steadily growing interest in ideas of 'late style', that is, of the relationship between writers', artists' or composers' final works, the style of those works in relation to their earlier output, and the practicalities of their creativity in old age and/or the proximity of death - and, in reminiscence theatre, practitioners have worked with people across different generations to create new understandings of the past and of late-life creativity. These different modes of research and creativity have worked to similar ends but in parallel and rather frustratingly out of contact with each other. The point of the proposed network is to bring them together, so that new understandings of late-life creativity will emerge from critical dialogue and will be able to cross boundaries.

Our proposal represents an opportunity for arts & humanities scholars both to influence policy and practice in gerontology and to learn from the traditions of gerontological research, which has always sought to translate ideas into actions designed to enhance social inclusion. For this reason, the dialogues we propose will include not only academics in the two fields but writers, performers, older people involved in creative activity and those involved in the theory and practice of old-age care. The ideas developed will be translated into outcomes that can be widely understood and help give shape to future interdisciplinary research and policy thinking. This, in turn, we believe, will help create new openings for HE's engagement with later life and specifically with late-life creativity, both in research and in practice.

The network we propose has significant impact potential precisely because it will draw together, and place in dialogue, a very broad range of people involved in a variety of ways with questions of the long life, of ageing, and of late-life creativity: arts & humanities scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives and traditions (literature, theatre & performance studies, art history, musicology); archivists, creative artists and performers; social scientists (sociologists, gerontologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists); social care practitioners; and older people as both practitioners and consumers. This mix has, we believe, the potential to generate genuinely wide-ranging social impact. In other words, the network offers the prospect of impact on a wide range of beneficiaries and users who will be as diverse as the discussants comprising the workshops. They include:

(1) later life activists, advocates and performers who will be able to take the insights of the research back into the community networks in which they are already active and engaged;
(2) professional performers and artists, with outstanding reputations and international profiles, whose consciousness of the issue of creativity in later life will have been raised, and which could raise the profile of the issue, and the research, through future discussions and events in which they will participate;
(3) carers, who will be able to develop new strategies for understanding and implementing the positive role that creativity in later life can play, even and especially in situations where cognitive impairment seems to have had a regressive effect on selfhood;
(4) curators of archives, galleries and museums, who over time might be encouraged to see their collections as health-promoting resources, stimulating cultural reflexivity through a raised awareness of late life creativity;
(5) Medical and health professionals, whose reflexivity and critical awareness will be enhanced by exposure to accessibly expressed key traditions of humanistic thought, and new knowledge formations such as medical humanities; and
(6) policy makers, who are planning the development of communities and physical resources for people in later life, and who can take the fruits of this research into account.

We believe, then, that the network has the potential to make a positive impact on the nation's health and culture; it also has the potential to develop valuable, research-informed and well-targeted guidance on public expenditure.