Reimagining sexuality, ageing and death

Join Professors Rebecca L. Jones and Erica Borgstrom for two inaugural lectures exploring how we understand sexuality and ageing, death and grief. Through research, personal experience and creative reimagining, they challenge taken for granted assumptions and invite new ways of thinking about queer joy, academic life, inclusive futures and end-of-life care.

Moments of queer joy: Reimagining sexuality, ageing and being an academic

Rebecca L. Jones, Professor of Sociology, Sexuality and Ageing, School of Health, Wellbeing and Social Care

Abstract

In this inaugural lecture, Professor Rebecca L. Jones uses the concept of ‘queer joy’ to reflect on her 26 years researching and teaching at The Open University. Her work focuses on ageing, sexuality across the life course and especially sexuality in later life.

She draws on Queer Theory, which starts from the experiences of LGBTQ people and endeavours to upend, make strange, and trouble our usual ways of seeing things. Professor Jones argues that troubling, rethinking and reimagining the taken-for-granted is one of the fundamental purposes of universities. She identifies key moments of suddenly seeing the world completely differently, here called ‘queer joy’.

She focuses particularly on her work around reimagining a good old age in ways that break down binaries of ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ ageing and are more inclusive of the diversity of older people’s lives. She will show creative outputs from various projects where older feminists and LGBTQ people have imagined their own good old age.

She will also reflect on some key moments of queer joy in learning to teach at a distance and in developing the skills of others in online education, at the OU and partnered with various global development organisations working on sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Professor Jones will draw on her own experiences of being a part-time worker, having caring responsibilities, and being chronically ill, to think about how we can trouble our imaginings of what it means to be an academic and so broaden the range of people who get to create knowledge.

Recently, LGBTQ and other human rights have been newly challenged in many parts of the world. Professor Jones’ inaugural lecture demonstrates some of the benefits of reimagining futures more inclusively - personal futures, societal futures and academic futures.

Read more about Professor Rebecca L. Jones

Learning from Death: lessons for how we make sense of the end of life

Erica Borgstrom, Professor of Medical Anthropology, School of Health, Wellbeing and Social Care

Abstract

Professor Erica Borgstrom’s lecture will focus on lessons learned from 15 years of doing research in dying, death and loss and the possibilities for re-imagining how the end of life managed and death and grief are responded to.

Death is universal and affects everyone, but experiences of death, how one lives at the end of life, and what people learn from loss are greatly shaped by social and cultural factors. In this inaugural lecture Professor Borgstrom will share ‘lessons learned’ from her research, interwoven with stories of ‘love and loss’ from her personal life that has shaped and been shaped by her research. In doing so, her lecture invites the audience to consider with her what the opportunities and consequences can be of imagining, managing and responding to death and bereavement in different ways.

The lecture will cover three areas of her work: palliative and end of life care, Covid-19 and grief, and what it is like being a ‘death researcher’. A common thread in her work is to consider what is ‘taken for granted’ and to look for unintended consequences. She examines these through the juxtaposition of policy and guidance, practice, and people’s lived experience – thinking through the combinations of what should happen, what is done or not, and how people make sense of it. She argues that by doing so, we can re-imagine other possibilities and foreground the importance of relations and interconnectedness. Engaging with re-imaging is timely as the UK, and other countries, wrestle with how to improve society, care and death. Especially in the context of increased care needs at population level, debates about medical decision-making and assisted dying, and the ongoing individual and societal aftermath related to death and grief from the Covid-19 pandemic. By bringing her personal life and experiences in, Professor Borgstrom illuminates how such re-imaginings are not just about policy and health and social practice, but also how research can be done and how to live one’s life.

Read more about Professor Erica Borgstrom

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