three - Understanding and transforming ageing through the arts

Summary

Introduction

Ageing can be both understood and described as a storied process, part of what Holstein and Gubrium (2011, p 103) have described as ‘the narrative quality of lives’. We hear and tell stories about growing old; we read and watch published and filmed stories about older people; we are surrounded by images of ageing with their implicit narratives. Such stories permeate our social world and shape our expectations about older people and about growing old ourselves. In this chapter we intend to explore this process further, drawing on research that has explored the character of the stories that older people tell about their lives and, in some cases, making the links to more formal narratives found in genres such as fiction and other representational practices, in collaborative artwork, in art galleries and the theatre. We are particularly interested in how dominant social representations of ageing (Moscovici, 2000) can be contested through a process of active narrative work, that is, engaging older people with representational processes at various levels as consumers of such narratives (as readers, as members of group interactions, as theatre goers, as social beings) and as producers of them (discursively, in interviews and groups, using diaries and through various forms of artistic expression). In highlighting such elements, we are interested in ways of challenging negative social representations of ageing through the active participation of older people in different art forms.

Both narrative making and narrative exchange are everyday processes of making sense of a changing world by which we provide a certain meaningful coherence to a series of events. Such narratives have a certain form and structure which can convey not only particular thoughts about those events, but also incorporate gestures, feelings and actions. As such, narratives can become not only descriptions of past events but plots for future actions. Freeman (2011) has described the phenomenon of ‘narrative foreclosure’ or the process by which we come to believe that life is over before it is physically ended. We stop developing initiatives and accept that decline and exclusion are inevitable. Public institutions often reinforce this narrative in their negative representations of ageing and in their exclusion of older people from a range of activities.

Narrative accounts are habitually and constantly exchanged and shared in everyday social interaction.