The conference, titled “The Lifespan: Perspectives on Ageing and the Life Course from the Medical Humanities, the Health Sciences and Age Studies”, extended a rare opportunity to researchers and practitioners to share their work at an event which explicitly foregrounded and sought out the many intersections – thematic, methodological, philosophical, and political – that occur between the sciences, literature, and the arts. The conference drew together a truly global group of attendees, including the perspectives of participants not just from the United Kingdom and other European countries, and North America, but even further afield, with academics from India, Nigeria, New Zealand and The Bahamas convening in London for The Lifespan. Early career researchers were especially supported to attend the conference, with bursaries distributed to ensure that the conference remained financially accessible. This support ensured the presence of a range of perspectives providing a critical redressing of the widespread cultural pessimism that associates ageing with decline, energising conversations about how such pessimism can be rethought and overcome in culture, science, and policy.
The conference was supported by a number of events designed to foster such conversations. It was preceded by a satellite transatlantic symposium that saw King’s College London collaborate with their long-term partners at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the conference included a trip to Science Gallery London for the exhibition Lifelines: Rethinking Ageing Across Generations; there was an evening reading from author Ulrike Draesner, who read translated excerpts from her memoir inspired by her personal experience of ageing, Eine Frau wird älter; and there was a rich variety of keynotes over the course of the three days that ensured people were together communally just as much as they were attending panels in the breakout rooms. Sally Chivers began these talks with a keynote discussing how she uses her podcast, Wrinkle Radio, to explore the fears and surprises of ageing with a series of interlocutors. Oliver Robinson gave a contrasting lecture on the biomedical perspective on ageing from European cohort studies. Kavita Sivaramakrishnan provided a global perspective in her talk “Aging as Crisis and Aging in Times of Crisis in the Global South,” which considered the impact of such historical traumas as Partition on ageing in India and Pakistan. The final keynote was given by Susan Pickard, who used Simone de Beauvoir’s enduring conceptual preoccupation with the myth as a way to explore the myths of ageing in relation to ageism.
The panels, organised by Aura Heydenreich, the President of SLSAeu, and Martina Zimmermann, the academic lead of SAACY, ambitiously paired together quite disparate talks into interdisciplinary conversations that teased out surprising connections and affinities, around such themes as biological ageing between science and literature; the use of literary narratives to interrogate cultural scripts around ageing; feminist and intersectional perspectives on ageing; methods of integrating humanistic and scientific knowledge; care relationships; and global and local perspectives on ageing. For reflections on individual panels, see also this blog by Dr Emily Bradfield, Practitioner Research Associate: Collections & Wellbeing, at The Fitzwilliam Museum, one of the speakers at the conference.
The conference closed with remarks by Des O’Neill and Aagje Swinnen, who reflected on the value and impact of the conference, and discussed with the participants the potential, promising directions for researchers to take up after the conference, to continue the conversations that this event had inspired.