Framing Ageing: A Clinical, Cultural and Social Dialogue (360G-Wellcome-218680_Z_19_Z)

Healthcare, sociology, psychology and the growing field of ‘cultural gerontology’ have begun to interrogate the complexity of ageing. Despite this welcome development, there is little methodological dialogue between the humanities and gerontology. This project therefore aims to explore methodological cross-pollination through two collaborative UCD/TCD-led workshops. Entitled “Framing Ageing: A Clinical, Cultural and Social Dialogue”, our project recognises that society is a web of signs subject to shifting meanings and contested interpretations. This insight has far-reaching epistemological and methodological consequences: it de-essentialises the notions of biological matter, of the body and bodily change, of mind and matter, and of the ‘natural’ chronology from birth to death. Drawing on research expertise in the two institutions and beyond, the workshops bring together gerontologists, who deal with ageing from clinical, psychological and social perspectives, social scientists who work with quantitative data, and humanities researchers, who investigate ageing in cultural and historical perspectives, as well as art practitioners and NGOs. A key aim is to create a transdisciplinary network that liberates the field from the constraints of pathological models of ageing by exploring an entanglement between the biopsychosocial and the interpretive, the empirical and the aesthetic, the historical and the contemporary, and research and practice.