Ageing is often associated with older people and with ideas of disease and decline. However, at a biological level, ageing begins at birth – ‘growing up’ is part of the same process as ‘growing old’.

As our population grows older and amid a social care crisis, what might research, care and community look like if we understood ageing as a lifelong process that unites rather than divides us?

The Lifelong Ageing workshop, organised by the Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth research programme and funded by UK Research and Innovation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, aimed to answer this question and explore topics around it.

Researchers from across the UK came together for the workshop on 17 May 2023 at Science Gallery London to showcase their work to an audience of charity and third sector professionals, sharing their understanding of ageing and to get feedback from people working on the ground.

The workshop included a range of speakers from departments as diverse as Neuroscience, Anthropology, Music, Medicine and English, all working on projects that take a lifecourse perspective.

Discussions revolved around the questions: 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?