videos
Videos: Last Chapter Seminar (sessions A-G)
Hovedinnhold
A: Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Approaches to Ageing and Care
Desmond O’Neill Towards Interdisciplinary Scholarship Across Arts, Humanities and Gerontology
Anna-Christina Kainradl Intersections of Migration and Old Age - Ethical Theories and Intersectional Discrimination
B: Dementia and Co-Creativity
Hannah Zeilig and Julian West Co-Creativity, Wellbeing and Dementia
Eli Lea and Oddgeir Synnes Cultural Citizenship for Persons with Dementia
C: Vulnerability, Variability and Complexity of Old Age in Literature and Film
Vivan Joseph Inescapably Human
Cristina Colmena The Archive as a Substitute for Living: Late life in Moreira Salles’ Film
Santiago
D: Care Home Narratives
Ulla Kriebernegg Rewriting the Last Pages of the Last Chapter: Celebrating Life in Long-Term Residential Care
Katharina Zwanzger “Last Chapters in the Book of Life”- A Linguistic Analysis of Life Stories of Residents of a Nursing Home
Eva-Maria Trinkaus The “Literary Foodscape” in Ladies Lunch: Lore Segal’s Perspective on Age/ing
E: Vulnerability, Variability and Complexity of Old Age in Contemporary Literature
Jorunn S. Gjerden The Ageing Self in Nathalie Sarraute’s Here (1995)
Teresa Hartinger Contemporary Austrian Literature on Age/ing
Ursa Marinsek A Look at Representations of Ageing in Eugene O’Hare’s Sydney and
the Old Girl
F: Poetry, Narrative and Visual Art in Scenes of Late Life Care
1. Tia DeNora and Gary Ansdell “Poems are made by fools like me”? Gentle Methods in Scenes of Care
2. Christine Hansen Crystals of Dust - Exploring Dementia in an Art Context
3. Bodil Hansen Blix The Necessity and Possibilities of Playfulness in Narrative Care with
Older Adults
G: Pleasures and Perils of Solitude in Late Life: Literature, Psychology, Gerontology
1. Inger Hilde Nordhus Loneliness in Older Age from a Psychological Perspective: A Double-edged Sword
2. Elizabeth Barry One’s Own Company: Insights into Loneliness in Older Age in Modernist Literature
3. Linn-Heidi Lunde Are We Living in an Age of Loneliness? On Loneliness Among Older Adults
4. Sharon Ost Mor The Gifts of Positive Solitude: COVID 19 Pandemic Impact on Positive Solitude Experience of People Aged 65+
5. Margery Vibe Skagen Montaigne and the Art of Being Alone
Bergen_Video_ONeill
Desmond (Des) O’Neill is a Professor of Geriatric Medicine in Trinity College Dublin, active in medical humanities and cultural gerontology for several decades. He is Chair of the Humanities, Arts and Cultural Gerontology Advisory Panel of the Gerontological Society of America, and Chair of the Working Group on Medical and Health Humanities of the Irish Humanities Alliance.
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Desmond O’Neill, Towards Interdisciplinary Scholarship Across Arts, Humanities and Gerontology
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Appreciation of the vital contribution of the arts and humanities to the understanding of ageing has been a developing trend for nearly five decades within gerontology. A key challenge, paralleled in the medical and health humanities, has been how to develop a critical but collaborative nexus of scholarship within these fields of study. A deep reflection is needed on the differing cultures, approaches, methodologies and incentives/disincentives to joint working of the many disciplines involved, as well as teasing out the opportunities and challenges of interdisciplinary scholarship. A focus of study is the inclusion of humanities and arts in gerontology and geriatrics curricula by the Academy of Gerontology in Higher Education: study of its implementation is likely to be a potential source of valuable insights into developing joint working.
kainradl_intro
Anna-Christina Kainradl is a doctoral candidate at the University of Graz. Her dissertation research focuses on old age and migration in Austria. She also teaches Medical Ethics at the Medical University Graz and is involved in projects dealing with age, autonomy, knowledge and health literacy. She is currently working for the research network “Heterogenität und Kohäsion” (Heterogeneity and Cohesion) and at the “Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care (CIRAC)”.
kainradl_lecture
Anna-Christina Kainradl, Intersections of Migration and Old Age: Ethical Theories and Intersectional Discrimination
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Austria is home to a significant number of old people who came as immigrant “guest workers” in the 1970s. They are a rapidly growing, heterogeneous population group in which different factors of migration interact in a complex manner. Questions of access and use of health services as well as immigrants’ health decisions reflect ethical issues of justice. Intersectional discrimination can prevent older migrants from expressing their own value preferences, their images of good life, or from using them for health decisions. Ethical theories reflect and structure decision-making processes and influence medical and clinical health decisions in the form of ethical advice structures and guidelines. To what extent these ethical theories are sensitive to forms of intersectional discrimination will be examined by using the example of Principle Ethics of Beauchamp and Childress.
zeilig_west_intro
Hannah Zeilig is a senior research fellow at University of Arts, London and research associate at University of East Anglia.
Julian West is a musician and Head of Open Academy at the Royal Academy of Music, London, where he is an Honorary Fellow.
They have a shared interest in the role that creativity and the Arts might have in advancing understanding about dementia. They were invited to take up leadership roles in Created Out of Mind, recipients of Wellcome’s prestigious Hub Award from 2016-18. Here, they broke new ground in their exploration of co-creativity and the possibilities that might exist in adopting this approach when working with people living with dementia.
zeilig_west_lecture
Hannah Zeilig and Julian West, Co-Creativity, Wellbeing and Dementia
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The concept of wellbeing pervades contemporary life. However, a shared understanding and definitions of what it is, are elusive. Nonetheless, the imperative to improve wellbeing guides much public health and social policy and there has been increasing interest in exploring wellbeing for people with dementia in arts projects. Most discussions of wellbeing in relation to dementia start from a perspective that assumes absence or loss; this is something which we query. Our co-creative projects with people with dementia in both community settings and residential care homes have prompted us to take a more nuanced, fluid and dynamic approach to understanding the ubiquitous concept of wellbeing. This presentation explores the experiences of people with dementia and their partners who took part in With All, a co-creative arts project funded by Wellcome (2016-2018). Our presentation investigates how co-creativity can affect wellbeing from the perspective of people with dementia; and explores how wellbeing might be usefully reconsidered. We argue that wellbeing can be understood as an ongoing social practice rather than a completed state. In order to reconceptualise it we need to adopt a transdisciplinary approach, that includes knowledge from outside academia and from people with dementia.
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Eli Lea and Oddgeir Synnes, Cultural Citizenship for Persons with Dementia
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The traditional concept of citizenship is linked to a rights discourse that emphasizes citizens' rights and duties in society. In such a perspective it may become increasingly difficult for persons with dementia to claim their rights and fulfill their obligations as full citizens as the illness progresses. In dementia research broader notions of citizenship have received increased attention to better understand how citizenship can be understood and practiced. Social and relational citizenship refer to how citizenship in relation to dementia must be understood as a social practice that is shaped and practiced in collaboration with others. In this presentation, we will present the concept of “cultural citizenship” as an expanded notion of citizenship in relation to dementia. We will highlight how inclusive, collaborative art practices can strengthen persons with dementia's cultural citizenship by discussing two art programmes; dementia friendly guided tours at KODE art museum and poetry writing project at a day care centre for persons with dementia.
Eli Lea MA, PhD. Artist and independent researcher. Lea’s PhD thesis was a case study of a participatory art programme at an art museum tailored at persons with dementia. Lea has been working with participatory art projects in various settings for many years. Her practice and research concerns collaborative and participatory methodologies, ethics of representation and citizenship.
Oddgeir Synnes MA, PhD is associate professor at VID Specialized University, Oslo, Norway and associate professor at Molde University College, Norway. Synnes has a background in literature and the humanities, and has worked for many years with creative writing and narrative practices in elderly care, dementia care and in palliative care. Synnes’ main research interests are in narrative medicine, medical humanities and existential care.
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Vivan Joseph, Inescapably Human
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“And they lived happily ever after”. We associate these words with the end of fairy tales. Evil has been vanquished, and the worthy survivors can look forward to what sounds like an eternity of happiness. In the world we inhabit, over the last year, the direct and indirect effects of a virus, and responses to it, have taken the lives of many who would otherwise have lived. The elderly have been hardest hit. Ageing, which always concentrates concerns about health, has been particularly identified with vulnerability. In this talk I look at ageing in the fantasy worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula Le Guin. What if becoming older did not bring concerns about health, or the approach of an end to life? Future advances in technology and medicine may take us further in that direction, so it is worth thinking about what those sorts of changes might mean. I also consider ways in which the vulnerability of old age can be seen in a positive light.
Vivan Joseph’s background is in philosophy, with a focus on philosophy of psychology, but his teaching and research at the University of Warwick include a range of philosophically-related topics, many in the medical humanities.
colmena_lecture
Cristina Colmena, The archive as a substitute for living: Late life in Moreira Salles’ film Santiago
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In his later years, retired in a small apartment in Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, the former butler of a wealthy Brazilian family, remembers his life in front of the camera of the filmmaker Joao Moreira Salles, his former employer’s son. The relationship that Santiago and Moreira Salles establish during the shooting replicates the dynamics of power and subalternity that they had in the past but also reveals to Joao a hidden face of the servant: for years, Santiago typed feverishly a million pages with the accounts of the dynasties of the world, from Cleopatra to the Kennedys. The lives of others became then an alternative autobiography for him. This archive, the purpose of Santiago’s whole life, becomes also a place to seek some comfort in the face of old age and death. In my approach to this documentary, I’m using the concept of “unmaking” as a tool to explore these lives not completely “made”, and the resignation of being content just witnessing the lives of others, a question often related to class and subalternity. In my analysis I connect the archive with the narratives of life and death and the need of leaving a trace behind after we are gone.
Cristina Colmena holds a PhD in Spanish Literature (2019) and a MFA in Creative Writing (2012) both from New York University. She is also a writer, a playwright and a screenwriter.
kriebernegg_intro
Ulla Kriebernegg is director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Graz. Her emphasis in research and teaching are North American literary and cultural studies, Age/aging studies, and Medical Humanities. Her latest book, Putting Age in its Place (forthcoming) focuses on cultural representations of care homes in North American film and fiction. Ulla is the chair of the Age and Care Research Group Graz and deputy chair of the European Network of Aging Studies (ENAS). She co-edits the Aging Studies book series (Transcript) and has won several teaching and research awards.
kriebernegg_lecture
Ulla Kriebernegg, Rewriting the Last Pages of the Last Chapter: Celebrating Life in Long-Term Residential Care
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In this paper, I will discuss the newly developing genre of “care home narratives” and explore the power of fictional texts and films that deal with living and aging in institutions of long-term care – places where the “last pages” of the “last chapter” are often set. Even though some fictional narratives reaffirm negative assumptions of what it means to grow old in a care home, others challenge them openly and can be interpreted as celebratory narratives of agency even in oldest age. Discussing the celebration of individual resistance and agency portrayed in many care home stories, I will focus on the Canadian short film Rhonda’s Party (2010) which broaches the topic of friendship and death, showing that even in oldest age, the last chapter can be rewritten.
zwanzger_intro
Katharina Zwanzger is a research assistant at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care (https://cirac.uni-graz.at/en/ (Links to an external site.)) and received her Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees in English Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. She participated in the ERASMUS programme at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland and is the recipient of the “Excellence in English and American Studies Award 2015” for outstanding academic achievements at the University of Graz.
zwanzger_lecture
Katharina Zwanzger, “Last Chapters in the Book of Life”: A Linguistic Analysis of Life Stories of Residents of a Nursing Home.
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Life stories yield intriguing information about different facets of aging, which can be viewed as a life-long process. Listening to the stories of individuals who live in institutional care settings provides an opportunity to access meaningful accounts of personal experiences whose analysis may allow for an individualized and more compassionate approach to ageing. This paper presents preliminary findings of a study based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with residents of an Irish nursing home exploring various elements of personal narratives. The study is part of a larger PhD project that explores the representation of social events and social actors among other aspects of the residents’ stories.
trinkaus_intro
Eva-Maria Trinkaus is a doctoral student of American Literary Studies and Critical Age Studies at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care at the University of Graz, Austria, researching American Literature with a focus on food, age, and place. She is a member of the Age and Care Research Group Graz and has been an executive board member of the European Network in Aging Studies (ENAS) since 2019.
trinkaus_lecture
Eva-Maria Trinkaus, The “Literary Foodscape” in Ladies Lunch: Lore Segal’s Perspective on Ageing
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In her short story “Ladies’ Lunch,” published in The New Yorker, the US-Austrian author Lore Segal addresses what it takes to live comfortably in old age. Ladies’ Lunch is an account of an older woman, Lotte, and her friends who meet for lunch on a regular basis. When Lotte, however, does not want to put up with her caretaker anymore and her son gets frustrated with her wish to keep eating what he considers unhealthy for her, Lotte gets sent to a nursing home. However, not only Lotte’s life is affected by this transition. This paper is going to analyze the literary foodscape as a safe space for interaction and agency, and explores the potential of providing a tool to look at ageing in literature.
gjerden_intro
Jorunn S. Gjerden (dr.art.), Associate Professor of French literature at the University of Bergen, has published several articles, an edited volume and a monograph on ethics and aesthetics, modernist literature, performativity, and postcolonialism.
E1 - Jorunn S Gjerden - "The Ageing Self in Nathalie Sarraute’s Here" (1995)
Jorunn S. Gjerden, The ageing self in Nathalie Sarraute’s Here (1995)
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Although predominately a pioneer of the nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999) also remains a writer associated with old age. Sarraute wrote the major part of her experimental literary work from her sixties onwards, publishing her last text at the age of 97. Her literature also frequently depicts ageing, but often in a depreciative way. The first three novels in particular stage anxiety-ridden elderly main characters frenetically striving to keep death at a distance. Against the backdrop of an analysis of subjectivity in Sarraute’s oeuvre, I will however propose an alternative interpretation of the representation of ageing in her later writing, epitomised by the evocation of the renaissance painter Arcimboldo in Here (1995). Narratively and thematically, this collection of short texts depicts the ageing self as constituted by the very processes that seem to threaten and negate self-identity, thus mirroring the way in which Arcimboldo’s composite heads simultaneously and paradoxically appear and disappear in an exuberant overflow of flowers, fruits, and incongruous objects. Drawing on Judith Butler’s recent work, I will argue that Here partakes in a broader exploration of the self as constituted by vulnerability, dependency, and exposure, while at the same time associating the precarious ageing self with intense experiences of an emerging fullness of life itself.
hartinger_intro
Teresa Hartinger is a doctoral student of German Studies at the University of Graz, Austria and a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care. She is currently working in the “App-solute News” research project. She graduated from the University of Graz as a teacher in German and History (Mag.) and she taught German as a second language at several schools during and after her studies (2016-2020). In her dissertation she deals with contemporary Austrian literature and examines it from the perspective of aging.
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Teresa Hartinger, Contemporary Austrian Literature on Ageing
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Age and aging are essential topoi that have long been the subject of literary studies and focus on various facets of the phenomenon. On the one hand, literature and culture reflect the current discourses of old age in a society at a particular time, but on the other hand they also create narrative and media stagings, which, as a result contribute to a discursive idea of old age. In contemporary Austrian literature, the subject of old age is frequently picked up and viewed from various perspectives. By comparing and dealing with different literary works, a more complex approach to old age in literature can be generated. In my presentation, I would like to give a brief insight into how diversely aging can be represented.
marinsek_intro
Urša Marinšek holds BAs in English Language and Literature and Sociology, and an MA in English from the University of Maribor, Slovenia. Her research interests include Slovene translations of Shakespeare’s plays, stylistics, drama, as well as aging studies. She is a member of the Age and Care Research Group Graz, and works at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care at the University of Graz, Austria.
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Urša Marinšek, A Look at Eugene O’Hare’s Sydney and the Old Girl
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Eugene O’Hare’s protagonist in the play Sydney and the Old Girl (2019), Nell Stock, is a Londoner in her seventies. Nell is in a wheelchair and requires help with everyday tasks; she seems helpless being immobile and dependent on other people. Sydney, Nell’s son, resides with her. He is not really helpful, but rather a ranting, resentful, and unhappy person who is only waiting to get rid of his mother. By all means, he shows it on a daily basis. He is not shy in his observations that his mother is aging, and Nell herself is aware that her body is changing. Aging in Eugene O’Hare’s drama is not the main theme, but it is tied to Sydney’s concern over inheritance and the fact that everything is changing, especially his mother’s condition. This paper aims at looking at representations of aging and old age in O’Hare’s play.
denora_ansdell_intro
Tia DeNora is professor of Sociology of Music at the University of Exeter and Professor at The Grieg Academy – Department of Music, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen. She is the principle investigator of the AHRC Project, Care for Music
Gary Ansdell is a music therapist, Honorary Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Exeter University, and Professor, The Grieg Academy – Department of Music, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen. He is co-investigator of the AHRC Project, Care for Music
https://careformusic212434243.wordpress.com
denora_ansdell_lecture
Tia DeNora and Gary Ansdell, “Poems are made by fools like me?” Gentle methods in scenes of care
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The Care for Music Project considers music in scenes of care in late and end of life, in the UK and Norway. One project aim is to develop further what we have come to call ‘gentle methods’ for recognising and capturing the micro-aesthetic features of musical interactions in scenes of care. To that end, we have been experimenting with ethnographic, poetic forms. In this presentation we will share some of our material and thinking about what poems can do in an otherwise explicitly research-oriented context. As a medium, we believe that ethnographic poetry – writing poems, reflexively considering the writing process and the poems’ claims, consideration of other people’s poems on ageing and care (for example, Philip Larkin’s, 1974 dementia poem, The Old Fools), and juxtaposing poetry with other written accounts of the research field –offers possibilities for sensitising us to metonymic processes within practices of music in care. Those processes in turn offer (for us) new perspectives and new methods for researching music and care.
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Christine Hansen, Crystals of Dust - Exploring Dementia in an Art Context
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In my presentation I will talk about Come What May (2014-15), an art project that attempted to cope with the loss and also to remember a mother who gradually faded away. While working on this project I started to collaborate with four other artists that that worked with similar thematic. I will talk about this collaboration and the result of this, the exhibition Støvkrystaller (Crystals of Dust).
Christine Hansen is an artist and art historian based in Stavanger. Hansen has explored her own family history in several projects. Hansen has a master of photography from the Bergen Art College (2000) and PhD in art history from the University of Bergen (2012). Hansen was an associate professor at the Art Academy, University of Bergen (2010-2019).
blix_intro
Bodil H. Blix is Professor in the Department of health and care sciences, Faculty of health sciences, at UiT The arctic university of Norway. Her research interests are in the intersections of narrative inquiry and critical gerontology. She is interested in the lives and well-being of older adults in general and Indigenous older adults in particular.
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Bodil H. Blix, The necessity and possibilities of playfulness in narrative care with older adults
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Narrative care is not merely about acknowledging or listening to people’s stories. Care itself is an intrinsically narrative endeavor. In this presentation, I build on Lugones’ understanding of playfulness, particularly her call to remain attentive to a sense of uncertainty, and an openness to surprise. Playfulness cultivates a generative sense of curiosity that relies on a close attentiveness not only to the other, but to who we each are within relational spaces. Generative curiosity is only possible if we remain playful as we engage and think with experiences and if we remain responsive to the other. Through playfulness, we resist dominant narratives and hold open relational spaces that create opportunities of retelling and reliving our experiences. Drawing on my work alongside older adults, I will show the possibilities of playfulness in the co-composition of stories across time.
nordhus_lecture
Inger Hilde Nordhus, Loneliness in Older Age from a Psychological Perspective: A Double-edged Sword
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A common understanding of old age is that of spending a substantial amount of time alone. Findings from numerous studies suggest that individuals report less positive and more negative affect when alone as compared to when in the presence of other people. Momentary solitude, characterized by the absence of social interaction at a certain moment of time, has been associated with less positive affect but not more negative affect in older age groups as compared to middle aged and younger adults. Such findings are in line with the idea that affective experiences during solitude may differ across the adult lifespan and that momentary solitude might be experienced more favorably in old age. This presentation will focus on loneliness as a useful construct to examine the importance of social relations for health and well-being across the lifespan. Momentary solitude may also offer opportunities for emotional renewal and self-reflection. Finally, it is argued that we need a better understanding of naturally occurring variation in the perception of solitude, as opposed to a forced or undesirable withdrawal from others.
Inger Hilde Nordhus is professor of clinical geropsychology, at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Bergen (UiB), and also professor (II) of behavioural medicine, at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo (UiO). She has for many years served as a research dean at the Faculty of Psychology (UiB). Professor Nordhus has an international reputation in the area of geriatric mental health, particularly with her research on late-life anxiety disorders and sleep problems in old age.
barry_intro
Elizabeth Barry is Reader in English at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Beckett and Authority (Palgrave 2006), has edited issues of International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Beckett Studies, and Journal of Medical Humanities, and has published several essays on literature and ageing. She is a partner on the interdisciplinary age studies project run by the University of Bergen, Historicizing the Ageing Self. She has also held two Arts and Humanities Research Council awards to work with doctors on using modernist literature to investigate disorders of self.
Barry_lecture
Elizabeth Barry, One’s Own Company: Insights into Loneliness in Older Age in Modernist Literature
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This paper will examine the modernist conception of art as inextricably linked to the condition of being alone, art being for Samuel Beckett “the apotheosis of solitude”, and the modernist novel for Woolf finding “its soliloquy in solitude”. It will connect this aloneness to older age, a condition central to the work of Beckett and prominent in several of Woolf’s novels. Growing older entails a necessary portion of loneliness there, even for Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, who is often surrounded by people. The paper will look at the subjective costs and benefits of the condition of loneliness in older age as explored by these writers, who connect it with creativity and dignity as much as they offer a clear-sighted view of its drawbacks. The paper challenges the idea that loneliness in older age is an unqualified social ill, while also looking to literature for strategies to mitigate its more harmful effects. It will take Beckett’s prose works Malone Dies and Company, and his play Rockaby, as well as Woolf’s novels Mrs Dalloway and The Years as exemplars.
lunde_intro
Linn-Heidi Lunde, Clinical Geropsychologist/Phd/ Associate professor at Haukeland University Hospital/University of Bergen.
lunde_lecture
Linn-Heidi Lunde, Are we living in the age of loneliness? On loneliness among older adults
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Loneliness is a subjective and complex phenomenon that is part of being alive. Persistent loneliness is often defined as the discrepancy between a person's desired and achieved levels of social interaction. However, a person may feel lonely with others and in a crowd. On the contrary, a person can be alone or isolated without feeling lonely. For some people loneliness is experienced as highly aversive. Thus, it is a risk factor for health problems and impaired quality of life. It is a widespread belief that loneliness is prevalent in modern individualistic societies, in particular among older adults. In general, aging is associated with greater levels of emotional stability and the ability to tolerate loneliness. It has been argued that aging means becoming more selective and less interested in superficial social contacts. For many, old age is a time of contemplation where the need to experience solitude becomes greater. Contemplation in old age is about reflecting on one's life and the big questions, expanding the perspective and feeling part of a larger whole. The purpose of this presentation is to shed light on and challenge the commonly held age stereotype about loneliness among older adults and to present a more nuanced perspective.
mor_intro
Sharon Ost Mor is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Gerontology, in the University of Haifa, Israel. Completed with Honor her Masters of Health Administration (MHA) at the Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences, University of Haifa. Completed B.O.T. degree at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She serves as a geriatric Occupational Therapist in the northern region of Israel. Professor Yuval Palgi and Dr. Dikla Segel-Karpas, both from the Department of gerontology in the University of Haifa, are her supervisors.
mor_lecture
Sharon Ost Mor, The Gifts of Positive Solitude: COVID 19 Pandemic Impact on Positive Solitude Experience of People Aged 65+
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Positive solitude is the choice to be with oneself, while having a meaningful activity/ experience, which results in positive feeling. Although positive solitude is beneficial, the empiric literature about the phenomenon is scarce, and even more so when it comes to older adults' experience of positive solitude. Moreover, as far as we know, not much research deals with the way COVID-19 pandemic effects people's (over the age of 65) ability to experience positive solitude. Can older adults continue their positive solitude experiences in times of continuous stress and social distancing? The current qualitative research (N=13, aged 65-84) deals with the COVID 19 pandemic impact on the positive solitude experience. Two themes emerged: Positive solitude is an anchor in times of crisis. 2. Positive solitude is re-chosen and meaningful as well as adaptive to crisis. First, positive solitudes' definition, paradigm and components will be presented. Then, differences in positive solitude experience (between younger and older adults, between older adults and their caregivers) will be demonstrated. Finally, the results of the study will be presented and discussed.
skagen_intro
Margery Vibe Skagen is Associate Professor in French Literature at the University of Bergen. She has published extensively on Baudelaire and the relationship between literature and psychiatry in the 19th century and has co-edited several anthologies in the fields of Literature and Science and Literature and Ageing. Since 2016, she is leader of the research project Historicizing the Ageing Self: Literature, Medicine, Psychology, Law.
skagen_lecture
Margery Vibe Skagen, Montaigne and the Art of being Alone
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Withdrawal from the company of others has always been regarded with ambivalence. Philosophers, physicians and Church Fathers have advised against solitude, because it was said to generate melancholia and to render the solitary more vulnerable to troubled thoughts and temptations. But both the vita contemplativa devoted to self-scrutiny and prayer, and the more secular literary otium devoted to reading and thinking, have been venerable institutions, especially recommended in late life. Today these forms of retreat are almost forgotten in a secular culture that valorizes visible achievements and active sociability. When national policies campaign to end loneliness, it is all the more important to revisit the virtues of chosen solitude. In his Essays, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) discusses with himself and his favourite classical authors, the challenges and rewards of being alone. Retiring to the tower room of his chateau with the sole company of his books, his aim was to devote his remaining years to “the study of himself”, and to the philosophical practice of learning to die. The Essays sometimes reflect loneliness and “the sorrows of old age”, but more often the pleasurable freedom of solitude. This paper examines the art of solitude from the viewpoint of Montaigne. What might be the relevance of Montaigne's ideal of self-sufficiency for lonely individuals of our day?
15.11.2021