Lifelong Ageing: A discipline- and sector-crossing event hosted by CHH

The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth (SAACY), a research programme on ageing funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, aims to offer a conceptual framework with which to overcome such cultural pessimism about ageing and influence policy change.

As part of the SAACY research programme, we ran an event called Lifelong Ageing at Science Gallery London in May 2023. The one-day workshop aimed to bring together early career researchers and representatives from local and national charities and other third-sector organisations – all with an interest in ageing as a lifelong process.

The idea for Lifelong Ageing emerged from a Policy Lab we had organised together with our collaborators at the Policy Institute at King’s in September 2022 (there are blog posts on the Report arising from this Policy Lab on the CHH blog pages you are currently visiting as well as the SAACY blog pages). As articulated in the ‘Next Steps’ section of the Policy Report, involving the full range of stakeholders will be vital in achieving attitudinal change to ageing that envisions ageing as a lifelong process with the goal to improve lifelong ageing for all. These stakeholders include Government, national and local charities (and other third-sector organizations invested in quality of life in older age and across generations), health and care practitioners, researchers and research funders, employers, education and information providers, creative industries, older people, and local organizations and community bodies.

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.