Carers Care Homes And The British Media

This book focuses on the relationship between the media and those who work as paid care assistants in care homes in Britain. It explores this relationship in terms of the contemporary cultural and personal understandings of care work and care homes that have developed as the role has emerged as increasingly socially and economically significant in society. Three strands of analysis are integrated: an examination of the representations of paid care workers in the British media; the experiences of current and former care workers; and the autoethnographic reflections of the authors who have experiences of working as care assistants. The book offers a rich contextual and experiential account of the responsibilities, challenges, and emotions of care work in British society. Grist and Jennings make a case for the need to better value and more accurately represent care work in contemporary media accounts.

Taking its cues from both classical and post-classical narratologies, this study explores both forms and functions of the representation of dementia in Anglophone fictions. Initially, dementia is conceptualised as a narrative-epistemological paradox: The more those affected know what it is like to have dementia, the less they can tell about it. Narrative fiction is the only discourse that provides an imaginative glimpse at the subjective experience of dementia in language. The narratological modelling of four ‘narrative modes’ elaborates how the paradox becomes productive in fiction: Depending on the narrative perspective taken, but also on the type of narration, the technique for representing consciousness and the epistemic strategy of narrating dementia, the respective narrative modes come with different prerequisites and possibilities for narrating dementia. The analysis of four contemporary Anglophone dementia fictions based on the developed model reveals their potential functions: Fiction allows readers to learn about the challenges of dementia, grants them perspective-taking, it trains cognitive flexibility, and explores the meaning of memory, knowledge, narrative and imagination, and thus also offers trajectories of a cultural coping with dementia.

Listening, Belonging, and Memory puts connected listening at the center of current debates around whose voices might be listened to, who by, and why. Arguing that listening has to be understood in relation to the self, nation, age, witnessing, and memory, it uses examples from digital storytelling, listening projects, and critical media analysis to highlight connections between listening and power. It centers on voices, stories, and silence, how they interweave, and are activated, maneuvered, reconfigured, and denied. It focuses on the small, microengagements that crouch within the superstructures of violent border control and the censorious policing of sonic citizenry, identifying cracks in the reshuffling of histories and hierarchies that connected listening affords.

This book provides an interdisciplinary focus on music, memory, and ageing by examining how they intersect outside of a formal therapeutic context or framework and by offering a counter-narrative to age as decline. It contributes to the development of qualitative research methodologies by utilizing and reflecting on methods for studying music, memory, and ageing across diverse and interconnected contexts. Using the notion of inheritance to trouble its core themes of music, memory, ageing, and methodology, it examines different ways in which the concept of inheritance is understood but also how it commonly refers to the practice of passing on, and the connections this establishes across time and space. It confronts the ageist discourses that associate popular music predominantly with youth and that focus narrowly, and almost exclusively, on music's therapeutic function for older adults. By presenting research which examines various intersections of music and ageing outside of a therapeutic context or framework, the book brings a much-needed intervention.

Ageing and Memory are two cultural processes that establish their own relationships with time. They affect our ways of living, in the present, and for a future, as we move through life. This book focuses on the cultural mediations of ageing and memory, teasing out their complex and largely unpredictable relationships and interconnections. Its overall purpose is to explore different practices, commodities, daily routines, sounds, images and technologies that configure memory and ageing and shape our experiences of living in time and with time. By covering a variety of phenomena, from biopics, music by elderly, and artefacts among other, this edited collection considers the cultural stuff that ageing and memory are made of and interconnected in singular ways, for and by particular people, in specific socio-historical locations.

Have you ever relied on the kindness of strangers? What brings people together to find hope and solidarity? What do we owe each other as citizens and comrades? Questions of care, intimacy, education, meaningful work, and social engagement lie at the core of our ability to understand the world and its possibilities for human flourishing. In Lean On Me feminist thinker Lynne Segal goes in search of hope in her own life and in the world around her. She finds it entwined in our intimate commitments to each other and our shared collective endeavours. Segal calls this shared dependence 'radical care'. In recounting from her own life the moments of motherhood, and of being on the front line of second-wave feminism, she draws upon lessons from more than half a century of engagement in left feminist politics, with its underlying commitment to building a more egalitarian and nurturing world. The personal and the political combine in this rallying cry to transform radically how we approach education, motherhood, and our everyday vulnerabilities of disability, ageing, and enhanced needs. Only by confronting head-on these different forms of interdependence and care can we change the way we think about the environment and learn to struggle — together —against impending climate catastrophe.

Providing the first UK assessment of environmental gerontology, this book enriches current understanding of the spatiality of ageing. Sheila Peace considers how places and spaces contextualise personal experience in varied environments, from urban and rural to general and specialised housing. Situating extensive research within multidisciplinary thinking, and incorporating policy and practice, this book assesses how personal health and wellbeing affect different experiences of environment. It also considers the value of intergenerational and age-related living, the meaning of home and global to local concerns for population ageing. Drawing on international comparisons, this book offers a valuable resource for new research and important lessons for the future.

Family caregiving affects millions of Americans every day, in all walks of life. At least 17.7 million individuals in the United States are caregivers of an older adult with a health or functional limitation. The nation's family caregivers provide the lion's share of long-term care for our older adult population. They are also central to older adults' access to and receipt of health care and community-based social services. Yet the need to recognize and support caregivers is among the least appreciated challenges facing the aging U.S. population. Families Caring for an Aging America examines the prevalence and nature of family caregiving of older adults and the available evidence on the effectiveness of programs, supports, and other interventions designed to support family caregivers. This report also assesses and recommends policies to address the needs of family caregivers and to minimize the barriers that they encounter in trying to meet the needs of older adults.

When the Unacceptable Becomes the Norm is an essential guide for any person looking to place a relative in care or already in the care system. Few subjects have aroused public concern since the millennium more than care for the elderly in the UK, and in particular residential care homes for the elderly. With a rapidly aging population this is a major issue for both national and local government, as well as a personal problem for innumerable people finding themselves in this situation. The media have widely reported the shortcomings of care homes for the elderly and in particular the many cases of abuse, neglect and malpractice. By definition, such people are often frail, in poor health and are always very vulnerable. The book seeks to provide advice for the increasing number of people looking for a suitable home for their elderly loved ones, based on both long personal experience and detailed research.The advice on how to choose a care home, and then how to keep an elderly loved one safe and well there, is practical and down to earth. The author also tells the story of his own battle to protect his mother and his experience dealing with the many outside agencies concerned with care for the elderly, including their many shortcomings and what lessons he learnt along the way.

This collection brings together leading research on contemporary and popular culture, focussing on marginalised voices and representations; socially marginalised, marginalised in media and media scholarship. It spans five continents, with contributions on topics like gender, sexuality, nation, disability, disciplinary boundaries, youth and age.