Crafting resilience for later life

This chapter studies the role of long-running craft activities in the lives of older women. The craft activities are understood as both creative and social experiences, and both aspects are seen as supporting resilience responses to the challenges of later life. Resilience is here understood as both individual and communal. The sense of purpose and meaning, and in particular the supportive networks that are accessed through membership of craft groups, can be seen to help people to deal with a range of challenges, some of them linked to later life. The findings highlight the wide range of emotional and practical support that is generated through craft groups. They also emphasise the value of volunteering as a component of resilience from both an individual and community perspective.

Social connectivity and creative approaches to dementia care: the case of a poetry intervention

This chapter draws together four concepts — resilience and flourishing, creativity and play — to explore the impact of poetry interventions in the lives of people with dementia living in a care facility. Participatory arts programmes can provide opportunities for people to be reminded of their humanness and re-membered as valuable human beings. Opportunities to be creative and engage with others contribute to resilience or the ability to transcend many dementia-associated losses. Through imaginative play, regardless of cognitive ability, people can express and/or enact important aspects of meaning and selfhood/personhood that might otherwise go unacknowledged in the care environment. While arts interventions may not be able to reverse cognitive decline, the case study points to ways that the poetry intervention creates a time–space in which people can ‘flourish’, express affinity with others, and foster social bonds, and how, in turn, these contribute to meaningful moments in people's lives.

Oral histories and lacemaking as strategies for resilience in women’s craft groups

This chapter examines an ethnographic study of a women's lacemaking network in Poland. It confirms the value of craft work as both a creative and social activity and as contributing to the participants' resilience. Older people choosing to practise arts and crafts resulted in enhanced personal expression and self-esteem. Indeed, lace making as part of a group strengthened social connectivity, increased confidence, and improved the group's perception of their social status. Moreover, sharing stories while making craft allows for memories and experiences of the past to be intertwined and simultaneously performed in the present. This project led towards reflection upon the ways in which craft making can be combined with oral history, constructing the space for formulation of new discourses of ageing. Regional identities, enriched by the history of objects, practices, and places, allow people to locate themselves in the context of narratives about craft making.

Setting the field: older people’s conceptualisation of resilience and its relationship to cultural engagement

This chapter evaluates data from a cultural animation workshop and qualitative interviews with a range of older people to understand their conceptualisation of resilience and the strategies they have used to overcome challenges experienced throughout the lifecourse. The participants felt that resilience was a useful term to describe their response to the challenges that they had encountered. They distinguished between emotional and practical resilience and tended to see it as an individual trait, albeit one that could be developed. The participants also expressed anxiety when anticipating whether they would be equipped to cope with challenges in the future. Discussions about strategies that participants used to overcome difficulties were particularly revealing. In contrast to the data gathered through interviews, using cultural animation methods provided a way for participants who were less confident or less able to express themselves verbally in a formal interview format to articulate their perspectives on resilience.

Integrating sense of place within new housing developments: a community-based participatory research approach

This chapter looks at a Canadian project which critically explores the potential of an action-oriented, community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach to reveal ways in which communities can be resilient to the opportunities and challenges of ageing-in-place. As part of the ‘Place-making with Seniors’ housing redevelopment project, a CBPR approach was applied in order to understand the sense of place of older adults through multiple vantage points. This resulted in a number of positive outcomes that revealed how community resilience and empowerment, articulated through participants' voices within the action research project, transformed the redevelopment in ways that were beneficial for older adults. As such, and in recognition of community requirements and aspirations, a number of changes were implemented so as to create a better living environment for older tenants.

Later-life gardening in a retirement community: sites of identity, resilience and creativity

This concluding chapter explores the experience of gardening in later life, focusing on how older people who move to a retirement community maintain or reinterpret their gardening identity. Gardening is a site of identity, creativity, and resilience in ageing: a strategy for defining and maintaining ‘body, mind and spirit’ in their new home. Phenomenographic analysis revealed that residents experienced later-life gardening in five ways: the productive gardener; the creative gardener; the restricted gardener; the contemplative gardener; and the social gardener. The chapter then highlights the significance of designing retirement communities that encourage engagement between residents and the creative leisure pursuit of gardening as a means of supporting individual happiness, pleasure, and resilience.

After the earthquake: narratives of resilience, re-signification of fear and revitalisation of local identities in rural communities of Paredones, Chile

This chapter focuses on the development of a psychosocial intervention specifically designed to support rural-living elders in Chile to overcome the trauma of an earthquake. The results revealed that the construction of individual and collective narratives of resilience increased older people's awareness of the strengths they have as a community. The memory workshops allowed participants to reflect on and share their previous experiences when confronting past disasters or community crises. Likewise, symbolising their emotions through creating music and collages allowed participants to collectively resignify their fear of the earthquake. In this way, participants transformed the meanings given to the disaster and simultaneously validated their own spontaneous responses to natural disasters or community crises. Both types of interventions, the memory- and arts-based workshops, allowed these communities of older people to search their own individual and community narratives of resilience, which seemed to have a positive impact on how they intended to confront future uncertainty.

Narrative identity and resilience for people in later life with dementia living in care homes: the role of visual arts enrichment activities

This chapter analyses data from a large-scale, mixed methods project wherein groups of people with dementia were invited to take part in visual arts activities. It assesses how visual arts enrichment activities might play a role in the resilience of people in later life living with dementia in care homes, through the development or preservation of narrative identities. The respondents demonstrated narrative intelligence that was expressed through the poem and the theatrical poses. Both of the activities supported the resilience of those who took part through facilitating narrative expression, for which those living in care homes often have few opportunities. The forms of narrative involved focused on the present and demonstrated that those with dementia were capable of creativity. Ultimately, this work contributes to thinking about the nature of narrative care, suggesting new approaches that help those in care institutions to retain their existing and develop new identities, facilitating narrative openness and resilience.

Objects of loss: resilience, continuity and learning in material culture relationships

This chapter discusses resilience as a response to the ordinary experiences of loss in later life: loss of relationships, loss of a home, and loss of objects. It specifically looks at issues around memory and material culture with particular emphasis on decluttering and downsizing as a necessary process over the lifecourse, especially when individuals move into care. Resilience here is described in relation to attachment to place and investment in a personal material culture that may help older people moving into care to continue with their lives in the face of loss. The chapter then suggests the importance of attending to the material lives of older people in providing opportunities for them to reflect on their lives, identities, and relationships. Caring practices may need to be developed that offer greater support for the process of materially moving to ‘a home’ from ‘my home’.

Ageing in place: creativity and resilience in neighbourhoods

This chapter explores older people's experiences of resilience in their neighbourhoods through a creative, participatory approach. Creative participatory engagement can help to translate public conversations into public policy and practice. The chapter argues that solutions cannot all be created within the neighbourhood. The notion that ageing and living well in neighbourhoods is down to individual capability, or can be managed collectively at a local level, is an abdication of state responsibility. If resilience is built from the situated self, then neighbourhoods need to be ‘ready for ageing’ and to recognise that older people wish to remain involved, connected, and engaged with all generations. Such resilient neighbourhoods should enable everyone to age well in place, particularly if influenced by a responsive policy landscape and strong lobbying for appropriate resources.