(cc) tim ellis

The training was called ‘Media training for experts’, which initially gave me pause – it feels over-claiming to describe myself as an expert although I suppose I am on a small number of topics. But thinking about myself as being positioned by journalists as ‘an expert’ was very helpful. As they said, if you’re being interviewed in your role as an academic, they’re not going to treat you as a politician, so they’re probably not going to push you as hard as they would David Cameron. And, as they didn’t say but I thought, being positioned as an expert who is also an academic will usually tend to position your statements as being more reliable and unbiased than other types of expert. Of course, that’s not necessarily true, but it’s an advantage.

But relatedly, you do want to come over as a real human being as well as an expert. So drawing on your personal experiences of whatever you’re talking about (if appropriate) can be a good way of doing this. I, and I suspect most academics, tend to depersonalise and generalise. But, just as in teaching, you often need to start with a concrete example and then move to the more theoretical point you want to make, so that your audience cares about what you are talking. One of the pieces of personalised feedback I had from the trainers from my mock interviews was that I needed to be clearer about why I wanted people to hear my message. I think saying to myself ‘I feel passionately about this because…’ might help with this.

I was amused to hear them talking about news values, which I’ve written about in K319, so that bit made a lot of sense to me. Hooray for teaching and other work synergy! I need to hang on to a sense of ‘now’ness, action, and things happening, especially when I’m trying to create news, rather than responding to an existing news story.

I need to identify in advance of any media work:

• what my ‘top line’ is – the key message I want to get across
• what the contrary argument is – journalists (generally) try to appear fair, so I may well need to argue my case. Or there may be a second guest arguing against me (although they should warn me in advance if that is the plan. But they might forget, so it’s worth checking).
• what the contentious or difficult questions might be. Then try to think of strategies that would allow me to acknowledge the validity of the difficult stuff but then make a link back to the key message. So saying things like ‘yes, that’s true in a small number of cases but the vast majority…’ or ‘but I do want to make the wider point that…’
• who does my message potentially put me into conflict with?
• what are the key examples/case studies/anecdotes that will help me make my wider points.
• what are the areas I cannot or will not talk about, and agree these with any other members of the team who might be doing media work
• if it links to my personal experiences, whether and how much I am prepared to talk about those.

A chronological account of a piece of research might go ‘we got some funding to investigate A, so we did B and the results were C which has the implications D’. But to make it news friendly, you need to start with D.

Don’t get distracted by the mistakes journalists make that aren’t really important. In my mock interviews, the trainer described me as the sole author of a report rather than one of many and used some terminology that I wouldn’t. But correcting that would just have distracted from what I wanted to convey in my precious 3 minutes. It’s hard though, because I do care about my co-authors feeling elbowed out and about precise use of language. But I need to ignore those kinds of things in this context.

Use direct and everyday language, keeping it as concrete as possible. Try not to use jargon at all and don’t use complex language unless you explain it immediately afterwards – in the next clause, not even in the next sentence. It just distracts people. For example, while most people probably know roughly what ‘LGBT’ means, if you don’t immediately say what the letters stand for, people start trying to work it out, so stop listening to what you are saying. Also, don’t mention details that are irrelevant to your key message but important to you, like who your funders were or where an event is taking place. They’ll distract too.

Some very practical tips:

• at the end, don’t hurry to take the headphones off or get out of the chair, even though you really want to. You might still be audible/visible/wired up.
• don’t wear noisy clothes – things that rustle or jingle
• feeling at ease is your responsibility – the interviewer is unlikely to have time to try to help you.  Try some breathing exercises or shoulder rolls.
• journalists are often looking for someone to interview in the 6-7am slot. And if you do that, you may get to set the day’s news agenda.

I’m anticipating doing some media work when The Bisexuality Report is launched next month. I may not actually be asked to do any interviews, but I feel much better prepared than I did.

(cc) Joybot

One of the things I really liked about the film was the fact that the central character was (when not in flashback) an old woman. So few films have protagonists even in mid-life that it was really refreshing and interesting to see one in deep old age (for further discussion of older people in films, can I recommend ageing, ageism and feature films and the work of Josie Dolan at UWE). One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about in the last couple of years is how people can be enabled to better imagine their own ageing and eventual old age. Fictional portrayals of later life are an obvious way of helping with this but there aren’t many out there (although the FCMAP project has a collection of novels here). While I loathed the real Margaret Thatcher in her heyday with all the fervour of a leftie teenager and young adult, I found the fictional portrayal of her old age deeply moving and sympathetic.

As I understand it, hallucinations are rare in most common forms of dementia, including the form that Margaret Thatcher is thought to have, but I’m not talking here about the reality or correctness of what is portrayed. As a way of representing the sheer impossibility of believing that someone who has been an intimate part of your life for 50 years is no longer there, I thought the hallucinations of Dennis worked really well. I don’t know whether that is how people feel after such a bereavement but it certainly made me imagine being in that situation.

I also thought the film did a good job of conveying the ways in which older people are so often treated as incompetent, irrelevant and foolish. Scenes such as the one in the corner shop – when she is pushed out of the way by the man on his mobile phone – are entirely everyday. For example, the Research on Age Discrimination research, undertaken by some of my colleagues from the Centre for Ageing and Biographical Studies (and me, in a minor way) found that being treated as seemingly invisible was reported as one of the most prevalent forms of everyday ageism. But seeing this happen to someone who used to be the prime minister makes even clearer the fact that it doesn’t matter who you used to be, once you are put in the category ‘old person’ you are at risk of being treated in this way.

(cc) rileyroxx

I was also interested in (but much less keen on) the way the film ended up focusing so much on her personal life, especially her relationships with her father, husband and children. I am suspicious that one of the reasons the film-makers decided to do this was because if they had failed to do this for a woman who was known to have been married and to have had children, it would have felt like too incomplete an account of her life. Filming a biography of a male public figure with only passing reference to his private life would probably be unremarkable but, since they wanted to make her at least somewhat sympathetic, I wondered whether this partly pushed them into featuring her private life more heavily. I don’t know. I may be coming over all second-wave feminist on this one. It has been known.

And this made me think about the cultural difficulty of telling a story of someone’s old age that doesn’t make it seem as if it was their family and any descendants that really mattered in the end. In societies such as the UK, where paid employment is so highly valued, I wonder whether, once you are beyond paid employment, the main culturally available narrative is of the significance of family. Certainly my colleague Jill Reynolds has found that some older people without children report that their friends with children and grandchildren seems to have lives (boringly) limited to their families. I’m sure that, for many people, their family does become the main focus of their lives when they are old. And that’s fine. But for other people, such as those who haven’t had children, who are estranged from their families and whose lives have not revolved around their families, such as Margaret Thatcher, I’d like there to be a greater range of ways of telling the story of someone’s life.

I’m no specialist in end of life issues, although I know a bit because of knowing about later life, which is when end of life issues come up for most people. I went along partly out of guilt because one of the organisers had asked me for help with recruiting older bi people to attend and I had tried but (as far as I know) failed.

(cc 19melissa68)

We started by going round the table, saying what our particular interests were in later life and why we were there. At the beginning of that process someone said ‘same sex partners’ as if that was a common experience to all of us and I prepared to start banging the bi and trans drum of ‘same sex partners does not cover us all, all of the time’. But then someone said how important it was to include trans issues in our discussions and gave some examples of how and why. And then someone else said that they particularly wanted to include bi issues because they are bi. And then someone else mentioned bi stuff again, and someone else trans and, really, by the time it came round to me, I felt almost redundant. Which was very nice indeed, and very encouraging. We also had some good discussion of particular issues for LGBT people of colour and people who have been living with HIV for decades.

Someone other than me was talking about the importance of separating out data from bi people from data from lesbians and gay men, which was very encouraging in terms of the likely reception of BiUK (and friends)’s forthcoming The Bisexuality Report (watch this space) which is going to argue just that.

I was delighted to hear that Age of Diversity, which is the successor organisation to Polari, are going to launch their website next month (it’s still in construction at the moment, but you can find it by googling).

There was quite a lot of discussion of the issue of people using a different name than their official name and the difficulties and distress this creates when someone is not fully compos mentis, or when their friends ring the hospital to ask after them but don’t know their legal name. I don’t know whether using a name other than your legal one is particularly common in the LGB community (I know it is in the trans community). I can imagine that it might be, but to me it feels an entirely standard issue in later life because, I now realise, 3 out of my 4 grandparents/pseudo-grandparents went by a middle name, so it’s an old chestnut to me (but none the less important).

People also talked about the importance of debunking the notion and scrapping the phrase ‘next-of-kin’. It has no legal meaning when someone is alive, only once they are dead, and it’s one of the main routes by which LGBT people do not get to have their nearest and dearest involved in their care. Lots of (sadly familiar to me) stories of estranged family turning up and making decisions for someone they had not seen for twenty years, while their partner or close friend is shut out.

I loved a passing comment made by a hospice chaplain when introducing himself and his organisation ‘we’re lovely. In fact, like most hospice people, you could say we’re terminally nice’.

One of the outcomes of the meeting was that the organisers are going to collect together useful resources on this topic. I’ll post the link for that once I know it. But for now, a few resources that I managed to jot down:

• REGARD (organisation for LGBT disabled people) and their campaign for ‘Sue’s Law’ (if you just search for ‘Regard and Sue’s Law you should find it)
• Kathy Allmack published a lit review on End of Life Care for LGBT people about three years ago
• NHS (don’t know which bit) has apparently just produced a guide on bereavement for (re?) trans people.
• Report on palliative care for LGBT people: National Council for Palliative Care (2011) Open to all?, NCPC and Consortium of LGBT voluntary and community organisations, London ISBN 978-1-898915-89-8
• Opening Doors Camden (part of Age UK) is launching a checklist for care homes and care providers on practical ways to be LGBT friendly. Out next week, should be available as a pdf on their website.

Symposium on critical approaches to dementia, ageing and identity

Wendy Richards
Sleep and dementia [not their titles, throughout, I'm summarising]

A really interesting paper on the different meanings of sleep to carers of people with dementia, people with dementia and their families, written up already in Sociologlical Research Online. [get a copy]

(cc brianisinyou)

Julia Twigg
Clothing and dementia

Clothing associated fashion and frivolity, not world of dementia. Identity and display, which needs active subjectivity. Dementia erodes that. Evidence that people with dementia do often lose interest in clothes. But new views of dementia after Kitwood emphasise supporting subjectivity even through dementia.

Kontos embodied selfhood. String of pearls over the bib story.

Clothes affect how we move and sit. Helps remind people who they are. Care homes favour comfort and ease. But a man who has always worn shirt and tie may not feel comfortable in casualwear. Comfort is also about social comfort, being at ease with your social presentation.

Clothes as closest-in environment, especially with the closing in of the world with extreme frailty. Clothes can help promote benign interactions w PWD, continuity of person.

Clothing often very important to relatives too. ‘She would never have worn that’. One of the few presents you can give someone with dementia [as in the film Mimi show in the opening to the conference]

Foucault standardised bodies. Concern for clothes for PWD can be malign. Lee-Trewick ‘lounge standard’ residents, specific kind of femininity.

Imputed wishes but what if the person has changed therir mind? What about comfort and ease? Is there truth in the body when there is no truth  if the mind?

Richard Ward, Hair and Dementia

Hair and Care project

Ordinary hair care is headwork only. Body literally cloaked off. But in haircare for people with dementia, the body keeps intruding

Cover of easily Kitwood book ‘person to person’ shows someone transformed by grooming (before and after picture). Grooming as way off maintaining worth. If identity is performative, how do the identities of people with dementia get performed?

NICE dementia guidelines make no mention of grooming and presentation

Hannah Zellig
Poetry and dementia

Ordinary language of dementia is poetic: Forests of neurons, tangles of plaques. Poetry as way of apprehending dementia which is so baffling and awful.

‘Who is that can tell me who I am?’ King Lear

Poems about dementia:

• The Solitary by Vuyelwa Carlin (2008) – Ellen and Lydia [I think more, not sure whether whole book is poems about dementia, might be]
• ‘Incredible shrinking brain’ diminishing poem by Laws each version more words cut out, like dementia
• ‘Somewhat unravelled’ by Jo Shapcott (2010) from Of Mutability

Precise language of poetry  and the loss of language in dementia is a fantastic paradox.

(Sheila Peace) Blank verse perhaps a particularly appropriate form because of blankness of dementia

(Hannah) Yes. There’s also some other poetry with very tight rhymes, brings you up against an endstop abruptly
Also ike the experience of dementia.

Is there poetry written by poets who developed dementia? Don’t know, would be very interesting if so.

(cc Capital M)

I also went to a paper about cultural representations of the ageing of Lemmy from Motorhead. It was by Magnus Nilsson from Karlstad University, Sweden. I won’t try to cover everything he said, just pick out some bits I was particularly interested in. Lemmy (or rather, Lemmy in his fans’ imaginations) is the antithesis of healthy ageing. He’s still drinking and taking drugs and having as wild a life as ever. In the famous song Ace of Spades he has apparently changed a clause so he now sings ‘I don’t wanna live forever … but apparently I am’. His fans view him as indestructible, telling a joke that only two things will survive a nuclear holocaust, cockroaches and Lemmy. 

It’s Theorising Age: Challenging the Disciplines, which is the 7th International Symposium on Cultural Gerontology and also the inaugual conference of the European Network in Ageing Studies.

(cc d6v1d)

(I have walked over this bridge over the river Maas. It’s lovely. But the sky was a more ordinary grey.)

It’s one of the best conferences I’ve been to for ages. But I’m not going to end up blogging as much of it as usual as I’m having an exciting range of technical issues. But here’s some.

Opening Plenary: Kathleen Woodward Taking care: Population aging, globalization, assisted living 

Who cares for carers of older people? In the US home care workers don’t get minimum wage or overtime (the logic being that the state should not be intruding into people’s homes)

Famous case of a care worker, Evelyn Coke, who sued for overtime, the case went to Supreme Court. Lost. Died.

Highly racialised, with Black women caring for White older people [I think less so in the UK and also Phillippino, Polish? But still racialised, and increasingly so?] Global flows of care givers, transnational, globalisation.

book recommendation: Evelyn Nakano Glenn Forced to care: Coercion and caregiving in America

 New frontier of worklife balance is not child care but elder care [academic feminists finally becoming interested in old age as it starts to affect them] 

Film Paper Dolls (2006) Tomer Heymann,

(cc golauglau)

Documentary about Phillippino MtF transsexuals, working in an ultra orthodox community in Israel as carers to old people. In the evenings, performing a drag act together called ‘The Paper Dolls’.

 Asked what he thinks about having a transsexual care worker, one man said “I got used to it, that’s life”. He had asked for a male caregiver but by the end of the film he gives her a skirt and matching gloves. 

Are ‘men who are women’ forced to care? Their trans-ness is not incidental to their finding employment as carers. Looking after older people is important part of Phillippino culture, they say, [does this extend to men looking after OP in the Phillippines or is it something that is culturally important but done by women?]

 Both carer and cared for are acutely vulnerable in this set up.

Historical context. Since second intifada, no more Palestinian migrant workers. Came from other parts of world. Visas instantly revoked if fired, sent home. 3 Paper Dolls left Israel for the UK where is at least a path to citizenship

In the UK the drag act become ‘The Paper Dolls fromIsrael’ transnational identity included into their performance.

Frail Italian elders, migrant workers [paper in recent-ish edition of Sociology about this] – previously odd couples in public spaces like parks, becoming unremarkable.

(cc) Blind Grasshopper

I wrote what follows for a colleague this morning, to try to make explicit some of what I have picked up about how to design Activities within distance learning materials, at least within my discipline, and for the kinds of courses I have worked on.

You could call it an empty box, ready to fill with the exciting activity of your design, or a shell, but I think I prefer ‘skeleton’ because the bones run all through the Activity, not just round the edges.

I’m sure I’m reinventing the wheel here, but since I couldn’t myself easily find someone else spelling this out, I thought I’d post it up anyway, in case it’s useful or people want to disagree or amend or otherwise comment:

A paragraph leading up to the Activity and (hopefully) making them want to bother doing it. Perhaps making a bridge between what they have just been doing and the focus of the Activity (although this might have been in the preceding paragraph). Explaining any context that they need to understand before doing the Activity (who is it they are going to be reading/watching/listening to? Where does this clip/reading/resource come from?) So that when they come to start the Activity, they already know what kind of a thing they are looking at.

Then, once you are out of the Activity ‘box’, a more academic voice in the paragraphs between activities, with citations and full license to introduce new ideas.

I bet Derek Rowntree said this better. One day, in my copious spare time, I will read some Rowntree.

Null points for originality but full marks for doability in very little time, thanks to the wonders of the internet (I particularly rate The Quote Garden). Also, sometimes the old ones are the best (I meant writing techniques but this is itself a quote about my topic). So this afternoon I’m looking for quotes about ageing.

There are an awful lot out there. Here are some of my favourites, not properly attributed unless the website did so for me:

• Old age is no place for sissies – Bette Davis
• Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional – Chili Davis
• In youth the days are short and the years are long; in old age the years are short and the days long.  ~Nikita Ivanovich Panin
• Age does not diminish the extreme disappointment of having a scoop of ice cream fall from the cone.  ~Jim Fiebig

(cc) Spookygonk

• There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.  ~John Mortimer
• Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.  ~Maurice Chevalier, New York Times, 9 October 1960
• The first sign of maturity is the discovery that the volume knob also turns to the left.  ~Jerry M. Wright
• There is always a lot to be thankful for, if you take the time to look. For example, I’m sitting here thinking how nice it is that wrinkles don’t hurt.  ~ Anon
• Grow old with me!  The best is yet to be.  ~Robert Browning
• I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities.  It is the only pleasure I have left.  ~Voltaire
• An archeologist is the best husband any woman can have:  the older she gets, the more interested he is in her.  ~Agatha Christie, news summaries, 9 March 1954
• Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.  ~Quoted by Francis Bacon, Apothegm

(cc) osmium

• First you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to pull your zipper up, then you forget to pull your zipper down.  ~Leo Rosenberg
• The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest.  You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.  ~T.S. Eliot, quoted in Time, 23 October 1950
• Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.  ~Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein), Diary in Exile, 1935
• Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.  ~Henry Ford

And of course, my particular favourite, after which this blog is named:

There is a wicked inclination in most people to suppose an old man decayed in his intellects. If a young or middle-aged man, when leaving a company, does not remember where he laid his hat, it is nothing; but if the same inattention is discovered in an old man, people will shrug up their shoulders, and say, “His memory is going.”

Boswell, J (1791) Life of Johnson Vol IV, p.501

When I say they’re my favourites, I don’t mean I necessarily agree with them. In fact, I’d be rather muddle-headed if I did since several of them contradict each other. Rather, I mean that they strike me as pithy and well worded and revealing of everyday societal sense-making about ageing and old age.

Today I managed to film a perfect example of this:

You can (I hope, dodgy camera work notwithstanding) see the general flow of the stream from the stick floating downstream. But the polystyrene block has got stuck in a local circular eddy which means it keeps being pushed up against the weir again. I watched if for about 10 minutes and it never moved downstream.

In my thesis, I was imagining the water in the stream to be ‘narratives about later life sex’ and arguing that there was a general flow of what people were able to treat as unproblematic and straightforward when talking about this topic. This was that older people are broadly asexual and less-and-less interested in sex. However, in my own data, and increasingly in the media at the time (and much more so since) there was evidence of a contrary flow, asserting that of course older people remain interested in sex and sexually active. (There were other sorts of contrary flows too, but those were by far the commonest two).

I was interested in the ways that different types of narratives about older people and sex were treated as canonical or not in different contexts. So, for example, I found that, in the context of my research interviews, the idea that some older people are still happily sexually active could be treated as entirely unproblematic and not requiring elaboration or justification. People talked as if they were not aware that the general current of the stream was running in the opposite direction from what they were claiming. I was interested in how they were able to do this (having established to my own satisfaction that my diagnosis as to the general direction of the stream was correct). The metaphor of a somewhat turbulent stream was my idea for how this works.

I argued that some parts of my research interviews were parts of the stream where the current was flowing in the opposite direction from the general flow of the stream. My metaphor of a stream helped me to deal theoretically with the issue, common to the critical discursive psychology I was doing at the time, of reconciling a fine-grained kind of analysis looking at the immediate orientations of participants with a wider interest in general societal trends which may not be visible in the immediate data.

I argued then that some streams were more turbulent than others and it certainly seems to me to be the case now that the ‘older people and sexuality’ stream has got more turbulent in the 10 years since I was doing this research, with features about sexy grandmothers a seemingly regular feature on Channel 4.

I’ve just reused this metaphor of a stream in a paper coming out in the Journal of Bisexuality this month, this time to think about normativity. I argued that there is a general direction or flow as to what gets treated as normative kinds of life course features, but that particular contexts can be parts of the stream where the flows run contrary to the mainstream. In this case, that’s BiCon and I argued that the contrary flow of the stream of normativity at BiCon helps to account for the wackiness (technical term) of the accounts that participants in my research produced.

There must be journals that accept YouTube clips as part of an article, but I don’t know of any in my field. So, in lieu, I will post it here and hope that some people find the elaboration helpful.

The successful failure of narrative in Lisa Genova’s Still Alice

Sarah Falcus

Novel about psycho-linguistics prof who gets early onset dementia [want to read this one too]

(cc) quimby

‘Everything she was was about words’, one of first words she can’t remember is ‘lexicon’. Metafictional concerns in the novel. 3^rd person narra but privileges PWD’s point of view. This conflicts somewhat with coherence and chronology demanded by novel form. (not experimental text, fairly trad)

Reader too experience something of Alice’s experience but not to get lost in it, as Alice is lost. Her missing words are also absent from the text, at the beginningn of novel. People’s names too ‘that man’ as she can’t remember her hus. Repeated sentences and paras. Don’t know some things because she doesn’t.

Alice is only 49 at onset – resists association of dementia with ageing. Activities of Daily Living questionnaire – is incontinence because of dementia or because of ageing? But pre diagnosis, attributes her anxiety, confusion, memory loss to menopause = natural v. monster of dementia

Nearly all fiction about ageing contains a ‘mirror-moment’ (Kathleen Woodward)

[Notes definitely getting more sparce as I got more tired]

Naomi Richards from the Look at Me project

Putting older women in the picture

Phototherapy. Working with Rosie Martin, who worked with Jo Spence in 1980s to create phototherapy! As before, using photography to heal, beyond the family album, dressing up.

Aged 47-60 women. 5 full days over 4 week period. Photo diaries to familiarize with camera, over one week. And to help them think visually. Not as a prompt to talk, they were as interested in the product as the process, unlike traditional creative methodolgies in social science which tend to focus on the process [and particularly the talk about the process] [very interesting. Think some more about the implications of this]. Re-enactment session on theme ‘transformation’ transformative visual narrative using props.

One participant’s theme was Gaga to Lady Gaga.

Photos within her grasp rather than the spectre over her shoulder [kind of literal/metaphorical thinking I’m not good at but really like. Seeing something that is literally true as well as metaphorically].

Marta Miquel-Baldellou, Univ of Lleida

From pathology to invisibility: the discourse of ageing in vampire ficture

Vampires don’t show their age and don’t age. Vampires first in fiction looked old. No longer. Repulsive, now generally attractive. Bram Stoker, foreign, aristocratic and old. Anne Rice Interview with the Vampire started trend of young vampires, and introduced vampire children. Also first to be sympathetic

Aged vampires in Vict fiction as sign of difference.As became younger, became more sympathetic, true hero of the novel. Appears in mirrors in modern novels [not in the novels I’ve read]