With the Last Chapter festival and seminar both having been postponed until June 2021, we would like to invite you to participate in a slightly different kind of online event on November 25th. This event, a Futures Workshop on age-friendly societies, is the first of two such events that will be arranged in the lead-up to the main festival and seminar.
Rather than presenting a paper or giving a talk, we would like to invite you to bring yourself—with all your experiences and perspectives, be they personal, practical and/or academic, from any and all of the different roles you inhabit in your life today.
We provide the framing: a democracy in miniature. Here, you will be given free rein to criticise anything and everything that is wrong about the way your local community or society in general views, treats, thinks about or deals with ageing today, imagine fantastical alternative futures of age-friendly communities and societies, and draft plans for how you—singly and in collaboration with your fellow workshop participants—can work to bring the present reality closer to the imagined future(s).
We look forward to seeing you.
<aside> ❗ Limited number of spaces avaliable. Sign up below! 👇
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Older persons (ages 65 and above) today comprise the world’s fastest growing age group. Globally, for the first time in 2018, older persons outnumbered children under the age of five, and by 2050, older persons will outnumber adolescents and youth (ages 15 to 24). —UN
For some smaller municipalities in Western Norway, this is already a reality. Decades of research, gender equality work and development of welfare services have contributed to Norway being a relatively equal society with good welfare systems and citizens who value their independence. The fact that there are more elders in our society is mainly an enrichment, but the increase in the number of frail citizens is set to push an already minimally manned elderly care over the edge. —Siste kapittel
This is 1) a projection based on current, global demographic trends, and 2) an interpretation of what these trends might mean for the future of ageing one particular community—Norway.
The future, however, does not simply happen, neither in Norway, nor anywhere else. Rather, it is constantly being created.
Siste kapittel and Fremtenkt would therefore like to invite you—whoever and wherever you might be—to an online Futures Workshop on ageing where we, together, will identify issues, imagine novel solutions, and draft plans for the creation of alternative futures of ageing relevant to our various local communities.
We propose to learn from what is different across our communities, and to discover cross-cultural characteristics of the futures of age-friendly societies.
The aim is to draw on our various experiences and competencies to create ideas that can be turned into reality and implemented locally, thus helping bring the present reality closer to the imagined future(s).
If, freed of all constraints, you could say exactly what you think is wrong about the way we think, talk, treat, imagine or experience ageing today—what would you say?
True freedom to speak one's mind is rare—even in academia. Within the Futures Workshop, we create a space regulated by a simple set of democratic rules, and nothing else: