Productive Margins: Isolation and loneliness of older people
Years active: 2016-2017
Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council
The Productive Margins: Isolation and loneliness project developed from the Productive Communities Research Forum, a site where academics and communities together identified the focus and research questions for projects that developed regulatory regimes for engaging communities, projects that arose out of everyday lives rather than the bureaucratic needs of mainstream institutions.
Through the Research Forum, community organisations working with communities at the margins were not only involved in conducting research, but also actively co-produced the agenda for research.
Research was co-produced with community organisations and with community researchers and artists in the Greater Bedminster area of Bristol and in the North Merthyr Tydfil area of South Wales. Research activities included fourteen interviews between peer researchers and the older people, participatory mapping activities with 10 older and younger people, focus groups with 25 service providers and policy makers in two locations, working with a dramaturg to develop monologues based on data collected from interviews (Alonely).
Alonely is a collection of diverse stories based on our research. Our aim is to make the experiences of older people more visible as a way of encouraging dialogue between communities, professionals, academics and artists. Our installation and performances are designed to provide a space for considering utopian futures where alternative understandings of social isolation and loneliness in later life may emerge
Project team
- Helen Manchester
- Jenny Barke
- Southville Community Development Association
- 3Gs Development Trust