Healthy Aging: Approaches from Literary and Cultural Studies

Beskrivelse

In our presentation, we wish to spotlight examples from humanities-oriented
research on age as it is pursued by a field invariably called age studies, literary
gerontology or cultural gerontology. The question of what the arts and humanities
can contribute to public health policy and practice is central to the interdisciplinary
field of age studies, which works at the intersections of geriatrics, sociology,
demography, psychology and social work. A key topic is the public perception of age
and how this perception is fundamentally shaped by culture. We are, as age critic
Margaret Morganroth Gullette has argued in her seminal book of 2004, Aged by
Culture, by which she means that the way people – including policy makers and
researchers – think about aging and older age is significantly impacted by one-sided
images, master narratives, stereotypes and socio-economic practices (e.g., “planned
obsolescence” in consumer culture). Age studies aims to identify and deconstruct
such naturalized conceptualizations of older age, claiming that unquestioned truisms
and reductionist views about older age (such as the master narrative of inevitable
decline) have a measurable impact on the health of older people which is strongly
influenced by intersectional dynamics. Not only do older people, especially women,
receive poorer care, which researchers have attributed to biases in health care
professionals; but it has also been shown that older people match the stereotypes
unconsciously, thus producing self-fulfilling prophecies. If one has learned that one’s
health will decline anyway, why care for one’s health? These effects have been
shown on the level of psychology, behavior and physiology.
But how exactly does a humanities-oriented field like age studies, with its
methodologies derived from literary and cultural studies, make its case? What is the
value of close reading and singular case analyses in disciplines that favor
measurable outcomes and big data?
In our presentation, we will echo a common argument, namely that the humanities
are valuable because they provide nuanced understandings, because they focus on
perception and biases and the ways in which our knowledge about older age, just
like health, is shaped and mediated by multiple cultural forces, and because they
focus on creative practices rather than stable or fixed meanings. While we support
these arguments, our experience also shows the challenges: research results from
the humanities often remain siloed in their own fields and interdisciplinary endeavors,
while applauded from colleagues in geriatrics for example, remain on the level of
decor, a nice-to-have and edifying interruption from the “real” science. Far from being
pessimistic, we will end with examples that illustrate a social and political impact,
such as the Caring Community Project “Caring Living Labs” (link) and a project on
Health Literacy of Older Migrants.

Periode	20. sep. 2024
Begivenhedstitel	Research at the intersection of public health and the humanities
Begivenhedstype	Konference
Placering	Odense, DanmarkVis på kort
Grad af anerkendelse	International