Study title

This data was collected as part of the Reimagining the Future in Older Age project. The aim of this exploratory, qualitative and create project was to develop social understandings of the relationship between future time and older age within an economically-advantaged, minority-world context. The objectives were to 1) add to sociological knowledge of how the relationship between older age and future time is socially constructed; 2) contribute to sociological knowledge concerning how older people perceive and narrate the future; 3) contribute new knowledge to existing sociological understandings of the future in older age by using utopian, arts-based methods; 4) provide suggestions on what would be the features of a society in which having a desirable future in older age is valued; 5) elicit ‘counter narratives’ of the future in older age from members of the public who identify as older, by using participatory forum theatre.In June 2016 after the UK had voted to leave the European Union, the UK press published several articles on how older leave voters had 'stolen the futures' of younger remain voters. The Times columnist Giles Coren wrote that 'The wrinkly bastards stitched us young 'uns up good and proper... they reached out with their wizened old writing hands to make their wobbly crosses and screwed their children and their children's children for a thousand generations' (Coren 2016: 28). In The Guardian, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett wrote that 'unless our scientists somehow miraculously discover how to halt the ageing process ... within 10 years, many of those who voted for Brexit will either be dead or in care homes that millennials will be subsidising' (Cosslett 2016). What was striking about these articles was, firstly, the assumption that older people have no stake in the future. Secondly, the apparent inability of people who did not consider themselves to be 'old' to imagine a future in which they would be old. So why do we assume that the future matters...