Arts and Ageing – Reimagine Ageing Network

Arts and Ageing – Reimagine Ageing Network 

March 21 10:00-16:00, In person stage@leeds

Call for Papers -Deadline 29^th January

The arts have been identified as an important driver in maintaining a healthy lifestyle as well as an important factor in ageing well (Baring Foundation Report, Creative Ageing – What Next?, 2023; Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing, 2017). Different art forms have started to enter mainstream health practices, through social prescribing, the agenda of creative health, and the emphasis on creativity in social care. The arts are considered not only an important factor in maintaining quality of life but also a possible route for health care, with research funders looking for interdisciplinary and innovative responses to conditions that resist clinical or pharmaceutical interventions.

The Reimagine Ageing Network is organising an event focusing on the intersections between arts and ageing with the view to celebrate current practice; present different methodological approaches; problematise existing agendas; and consider ways for furthering the implementation of different artistic practices within social, community and private settings.

The aim of the event will be to (re)present the breadth of research in the arts and ageing across different disciplines; enable researchers to share their work in an interdisciplinary context; and position research projects within local and national priorities on health and social care.

We invite: papers (15 min), short provocations, posters, themes for roundtable discussions and artworks on the following themes:

Creativity and Ageing

• What is the relationship between creativity/artistic practice and the ageing process?
• In what ways can notions of creativity and artistic practice become enriched through experiences of ageing?

Arts as Intervention

• How are the arts currently used in social care practice?
• What are the paradigms that guide current approaches?
• What kind of impact can arts as intervention claim?
• Can artistic practice help us age better?
• What are the obstacles in optimising arts participation as a form of intervention in the ageing process?

Arts as Methodology

• In what ways can the arts enable a more thorough and holistic understanding of the ageing process?
• What can the arts reveal about processes and experiences of ageing that remain unaccounted for or concealed in other approaches?
• Which aspects of ageing may art-based methodologies bring to the fore and how can these insights intersect with more traditional approaches?
• In what ways may the arts shift stereotypical representations of ageing and usher in new understandings?

 

Please send a 200 word abstract to ReimaginingAgeing@leeds.ac.uk by Monday the 29^th of January, including:

• The title for your presentation
• the name of speaker(s)
• the preferred presentation format
• your technical requirements.

Presenters will be notified by mid February and a schedule for the event will become circulated by end of February.