Late-life Creativity and the 'new old age': Arts & Humanities and Gerontology in Critical Dialogue

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The UK's population is ageing, and this demographic trend poses challenges and opportunities for our societies and the knowledge economies that serve them. A key topic, we believe, is creativity and specifically late-life creativity. Our primary set of questions is: what is 'late-life creativity'? How might we define it? And in what ways is it different from creativity at earlier phases of life? We will explore these questions by bringing together scholars in arts and humanities and in critical gerontology, along with creative artists and performers, social care practitioners, and older people. The network will be shaped by four themed workshops focused on: identity and discipline; 'late style'; memory; and community. In recent years, gerontologists have explored new lifestyles in later life and their implications for understanding community and well-being; while in literature and theatre, art history, and music, there has been a critical focus on the limitations of common understandings of old age in the assessment of late-life creative output - there has, for instance, been a steadily growing interest in ideas of 'late style', that is, of the relationship between writers', artists' or composers' final works, the style of those works in relation to their earlier output, and the practicalities of their creativity in old age and/or the proximity of death - and, in reminiscence theatre, practitioners have worked with people across different generations to create new understandings of the past and of late-life creativity. These different modes of research and creativity have worked to similar ends but in parallel and rather frustratingly out of contact with each other. The point of the proposed network is to bring them together, so that new understandings of late-life creativity will emerge from critical dialogue and will be able to cross boundaries.Our proposal represents an opportunity for arts & humanities scholars both to influence policy and practice in gerontology and to learn from the traditions of gerontological research, which has always sought to translate ideas into actions designed to enhance social inclusion. For this reason, the dialogues we propose will include not only academics in the two fields but writers, performers, older people involved in creative activity and those involved in the theory and practice of old-age care. The ideas developed will be translated into outcomes that can be widely understood and help give shape to future interdisciplinary research and policy thinking. This, in turn, we believe, will help create new openings for HE's engagement with later life and specifically with late-life creativity, both in research and in practice.