Lifelong Ageing aimed at providing a platform for productive conversation across sectors and disciplines – to offer third-sector partners the opportunity to help shape academic research projects and, in reverse, to support early career researchers in discovering and developing the impact potential of their work. We invited up-and-coming researchers from across the UK to showcase their work to an audience of charity and third-sector professionals, sharing their understanding of ageing as a lifelong process and getting feedback from people working on the ground. Our speakers came from departments as diverse as Neuroscience, Anthropology, Music, Medicine and English, all working on projects that take a lifecourse perspective.
Discussions revolved around questions like: What does it mean to flourish as we age? How can technological, intersectional or intergenerational approaches help ageing research? And, most importantly, how can we make our research relevant to people’s everyday realities? Although from such a wide range of disciplines and approaches, many of the talks resonated with each other in meaningful ways and produced interesting parallels. Camille Aubry’s live illustration of the day’s conversation (pictured at the top of this post) captures the breadth of the topics covered and conveys a sense of the buzz in the room.
Building on the insights of our first Policy Lab, SAACY will continue to encourage conversations like at Lifelong Ageing, which need to take place if we are going to tackle important issues like ageing. If you’d like to run a similar event, have a look at the report we have produced about Lifelong Ageing.
We thank UK Research and Innovation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (in particular the AHRC Impact Acceleration Account awarded to King’s) for funding this event.
This text builds on a blog post about Lifelong Ageing published on the SAACY blog pages.