Understanding how creative interventions can help develop social connectivity and resilience for older people is vital in developing a holistic cross-sector approach towards ageing well.
Academics with a wide range of expertise critically reflect on how the built environment, community living, cultural participation, lifelong learning, and artist-led interventions encourage older people to thrive and overcome both challenging life events and the everyday changes associated with ageing.
The book uses a range of approaches, including participatory research methods, to bring the voices of older people themselves to the foreground. It looks at how taking part in creative interventions develops different types of social relationships and fosters resilience.
This volume and its companion, The New Dynamics of Ageing Volume 1, provide comprehensive multi-disciplinary overviews of the very latest research on ageing. Together they report the outcomes of the most concerted investigation ever undertaken into both the influence shaping the changing nature of ageing and its consequences for individuals and society.
This book concentrates on four major themes: autonomy and independence in later life, biology and ageing, food and nutrition and representation of old age. Each chapter provides a state of the art topic summary as well as reporting the essential research findings from New Dynamics of Ageing research projects. There is a strong emphasis on the practical implications of ageing and how evidence-based policies, practices and new products can produce individual and societal benefits.
project – each visit included a guided tour, and then participants discussed their impressions and reflected on what they had seen in focus groups. The project’s overall aim was to determine how older adults consume contemporary visual art as content for identity construction practices, and how that relates to wellbeing. This chapter explores the influence of encounters with contemporary visual art on the construction of older persons’ narrative identities, and how this involves the process of positioning in respect to wider societal meta-narratives, specifically
by the artists in this process were critical: they were able to facilitate the enrichment activity in a way that scaffolded the narrative that was being produced while enabling the respondents to control the content and creative expression involved. The arts enrichment activities produced cannot be directly viewed as a response to negative societal meta-narratives (Hammack, 2011) of dementia or age because the majority of the respondents lacked the awareness required to do this. However, they did have an effect upon some of the care staff and family members
