Mapping Cultural Narratives across Disciplines: Aging, Disability, Dementia

Though the health humanities often attend to personal narratives or media representations of aging, disability, and dementia, the study of cultural narratives—the shared ideas and values that circulate within a society—is distinct. Understanding how cultural narratives facilitate or impede social change is increasingly recognized as part of equity-based research and practice. This panel explores how scholars and practitioners can work across bioethics and the humanities to better understand the cultural narratives that shape the experience of old age, revealing how these fields’ approaches can deepen each other’s insights.

This panel is informed by an ongoing collaboration among scholars in age studies, bioethics, disability studies, social gerontology, and health humanities. Presenter 1 shows how attending to cultural narratives can help reframe and focus conversations about policy priorities, examining how cultural narratives about "value" surface in deliberations about investments in housing for older adults. Presenter 2 highlights how cultural narratives of unreliability discount the experiences of people living with dementia. Presenter 3 discusses how cultural narratives about disability and dementia have impeded solidarity among affiliated groups, offering potential reframings for cross-movement advocacy. Presenter 4 argues that the cultural prioritization of narrative itself can marginalize individuals perceived as incapable of narrating their experiences, and so non-narrative/non-verbal communication must be included among stakeholder perspectives. Collectively, the panel illuminates the role of cultural narratives in shaping public discourse around aging and envisions how interdisciplinary study of these narratives may help introduce new, and more inclusive, shared understandings to public conversations.