The aim of our project is to use creative writing workshops to examine and begin to challenge the workings of ageism in the cultural industries. Our project brings cross-field cultural workers into close partnership with academics to promote social inclusion.

Our method is fundamental to our work. We seek to democratize the research process by bringing the voices of the cultural workers into the co-production of data and analysis. Deploying creative practice as a methodological tool for research into social inclusion, the workshops will generate creative pieces as a research outcome—with the potential for them to be recirculated back into the artists’ work. The data generated, relating both to content and methodology, will be published in three planned journal articles that explore, from different perspectives, power relations in the cultural industries.

Work on ageism has examined representations of older people and the impact these have on prejudicial attitudes. Less is known about the mechanisms within the cultural industries that produce and circulate those representations. Research to date has also tended to focus on single field of cultural production—mostly dance. There is nothing that considers the cultural ecology of the creative industries and their fruitful, and perhaps complex, interconnections. We address this by inviting actresses, dancers, and film makers into workshops that make their experiences and voices central.

Our project speaks to the values of the ISRF through its fusion of interdisciplinary modes of enquiry across sociology, media studies, literary criticism and creative writing. Finally, in its use of creative practice as both innovative research method and outcome, it finds solutions to combat a pressing problem—that of ageism in the UK cultural industries.