Pleasure and time in senior dance: bringing temporality into focus in the field of ageing

A participatory arts programme – Shared experience for family caregivers and care recipients

AIM

This study aimed to describe family caregivers of older people's experiences of participatory art interventions, including music, dance and visual arts.

DESIGN

A descriptive qualitative study.

METHODS

Thematic interviews were conducted with 12 family caregivers. Qualitative data were analysed with thematic analysis.

RESULTS

The results illustrated the meaning of art groups, which included a shared feeling of togetherness, empowering and activating peer support and a sense of communality. Art groups also represented a hobby, enhancing caregivers' social and mental well-being. The art groups could be described as an art-driven, participatory shared experience. Participatory arts are noteworthy contributors to the well-being of family caregivers and care recipients, especially from peer support and communality. Further research is needed to find out about participants' preferred art-based activities and their impact on their well-being. No patient or public contribution because of inflexibility in the timing of engagement.

Senior Women's Dance: From Pleasure to Emancipation

The aim of this paper is to capture older adult women’s experience of dance. To this purpose, a qualitative research study was carried out with members of the ‘Gracje’ dance group. The study used Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action as its theoretical underpinnings. The focus was on the models of action and validity claims expressed in language (narrative). In this theoretical framework, dancing activity has been shown as promoting not only physical health and mental wellbeing but also social involvement. Our study has found that, in and through dance, the older adults primarily realised their claims to pleasure, attractiveness, health and emancipation. This has considerably improved their bodily capacity and increased their self-esteem. However, what the older adults themselves find most important is that the realisation of these claims beneficially affects their interactions in family and neighbourly communities and facilitates their engagement in volunteer activities, helping people at risk of exclusion due to age and/or disability.

Dancing My Age: Emotions, Interactions, and Bodily Sensations

While there is a growing body of research on the social aspects of older people's dance, studies focusing on emotions are rare. In this study, we use an interactionist sociological perspective to examine the role of emotions in older social dancers' experiences in Sweden. Through qualitative interviews with 29 active or previously active dancers, we found that their experiences of emotional energy and experiences of flow override concerns of age and aging. Age, however, did become significant as the age differences at dance events could bring forth feelings of alienation associated with feeling old. In addition, cultural and gendered norms of appropriate age differences between dancing partners produced shame and pride as well as feelings of being either old or young. Moreover, certain bodily experiences were interpreted in terms of age. Overall, the study contributes to the discussions of the complexity of subjective experiences of age by highlighting its emotional aspects through social partner dancing.

Reading time: exploring the temporal experiences of reading

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore various concepts of time and temporal dimensions in the context of everyday reading experiences.

Design/methodology/approach

The study uses theoretical bricolage that puts existing reading research into conversation with theories of time and temporalities.

Findings

Three registers of time in reading are put forward: (1) libraries and books as places that readers return to again and again over time, (2) temporalized reading bodies and (3) everyday reading as a temporalized practice.

Research limitations/implications

Using lenses of time and temporalities, everyday reading is shown to be central to ways of being in time. Subjectives experiences of time in the context of reading expand the limited ways that time is presented in much Library and Information Science (LIS) reading research.

Originality/value

This paper offers a new conceptual framework for studies of reading and readers in LIS.