慶應義塾大学 X Dignity センター

“Ageing and Space” Symposium

Organised as part of the “Re-imagining Life Course” project at Keio University X Dignity Centre, this symposium seeks to draw attention to space as a significant aspect of the ageing experience and the important role that narratives play in shaping our understanding of that experience.

Space has a significant impact on older people’s lives and identities. Older age has traditionally been associated with immobility, care and home. However, some aspects of this association derive from, and reproduce, narrow stereotypes of ageing as decline and of old age as burden. Furthermore, social, cultural and economic changes have transformed the spatiality of ageing through the life course, as more and more people move across spatial, geographical and cultural boundaries, either out of choice or necessity, for work or retirement, and to provide or receive care. The spatiality and the place of ageing, then, is a key concern in thinking about what it may mean to age well, with dignity.

The symposium brings together six speakers who will explore the spatiality of ageing through a range of different narratives, narrative genres and media.

Date/Time: 9.00-13.00, 11 December 2025 (Hybrid)
Venue: Tim Cadbury/Music Room, Downing College, University of Cambridge

Programme:
9.00-9.05 Welcome
9.05-10.25
Iza Kavedžija (University of Cambridge), “Creating ibasho: Community Spaces for Aging with Dignity in Japan”
Aagje Swinnen (Maastricht University), “Human Forever (2023) and Ben jij bij mij/Are You With Me (2021): Dutch Dementia Documentaries against Dehumanization“
Katsura Sako (Keio University/Downing College), “Ageing, Walking and Home in Walking Memoirs”

10.25-10.40 Break
10.40-13.00
Elizabeth Barry (University of Warwick), ‘”Only touch me, for my hand is tender”: Ageing, Space and Touch in the Work of Charles Dickens”
Heike Hartung (Potsdam University), “Literature at the End of Life: Challenges to Genre and the Writer’s Identity in the Case of Jenny Diski”
Sarah Falcus (Independent Scholar), “Between the Wild and the Domestic: Gardens, Age and Generation in Children’s Picturebooks”

The event is free and open to all, but places are limited. Please register here before 5pm (UK time), 9 December 2025.

For inquiries, please contact Katsura Sako (Keio University/Downing College) (k.sako@keio.jp).

Speakers:

Elizabeth Barry is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Warwick, UK. She has published widely in medical humanities and ageing, including the 2020 volume Literature and Ageing, and a double special issue of the journal Age Culture Humanities (2024-25) on ‘Transitional and Relational Ageing’ (both with Margery Vibe Skagen). She also has articles on ageing in Textual Practice, Poetics Today, European Journal of English Studies, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’ hui, and a variety of book chapters. Her monograph on ageing and time in modern literature and thought is under contract with Bloomsbury. Prof Barry’s other specialism is the work of Samuel Beckett, and publications include Beckett and Authority (2006), and two journal special issues on Beckett, medicine and the mind (Journal of Beckett Studies, 2008; and (with Ulrika Maude and Laura Salisbury) Journal of Medical Humanities, 2016). She has also been the recipient of medical humanities and age studies grants with the Arts and Humanities Research Fund and the Norwegian Research Council.

Sarah Falcus is a researcher in literary and age studies. She is the co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film (with Raquel Medina and Heike Hartung, 2023) and Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care (with Katsura Sako, 2021). Her current work centres around space, age and generation, with a particular focus on the garden as explored in literary and cultural texts.

Heike Hartung, PhD habil., is a senior scholar in Anglophone Literatures at the University of Potsdam with a research focus in narrative theory, interdisciplinary ageing, disability and gender studies. She is associated as CIRAC Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care and as research fellow at the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz. She is a founding member of the European Network in Aging Studies (ENAS) and co-editor of the Aging Studies publication series with transcript, Bielefeld. Recent co-edited publications include Masculinities ageing between Cultures: Relationality, Kinship and Care in Dialogue (2024) and The Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film (2023). Her current research focuses on grief representations and writing at the end of life.

Iza Kavedžija is an Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is a social and medical anthropologist working in Japan with interests in care, aging and wellbeing. She is particularly interested in showing how people find ways to live well and meaningfully against adversity. Her book publications include Meaning in Life: Tales from Aging Japan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); Values of Happiness: Toward an Anthropology of Purpose in Life (with Harry Walker, University of Chicago Press, 2016); and The Process of Wellbeing: Conviviality, Care, Creativity (Cambridge University Press, 2021). More recently, Iza has been working on multimodal methods in anthropology and is currently a PI on a British Academy Talent Development Award ‘The Ethnographic Portfolio: Arts-based methods for anthropology’.

Katsura Sako is a professor of English at Keio University in Japan. Her research brings together literary and age/ing studies, and she has published on age/ing, generation, dementia and care in a range of narratives in English and Japanese including children’s picturebooks, detective and speculative fiction, graphic memoirs, films and TV series. She is a co-author and a co-editor (with Sarah Falcus) of Contemporary Narratives of Dementia: Ethics, Ageing, Politics and Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care. Her current project explores the spatiality of ageing, with a focus on literary and cultural narratives of ageing and walking.

Aagje Swinnen is a full professor in Aging Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, where she also chairs the Department of Literature and Art. She is originally trained as a literary scholar and has grown her areas of expertise into the fields of critical age(ing) and critical dementia studies. Her research topics include: expert readings of age ideologies (and their intersections) in literature, photography, and film; lay readings of literature about later life, the normalized life course, and loneliness through Shared Reading and a book and writing club; the meaning of spoken word-based activities, such as the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project and TimeSlips, in dementia care settings; the way professional artists understand and give meaning to creativity in the later stages of their career; and the development of more age just universities. Swinnen is co-founder of the European Network in Aging Studies, co-editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging (2024), and co-editor of Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal.