Dementia, Care and Social Innovation in a Long-Lived Society

Inspire Research Series @ FSAS
Dementia, Care and Social Innovation in a Long-Lived Society

Chair: assist. prof. dr. Anamarija Kejžar
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Work

📅 Tuesday, May 26
🕙 12:00–13:30
📍 Room: Spatele Amfiteatrului, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work (FSAS), UBB

Presentation Overview

In a long-lived society, dementia is becoming increasingly common. The stories of people with dementia are entering our understanding, acceptance, and daily lives. Social work has significant potential to ensure dignity for people with dementia by developing individualised care in suitable environments that allow freedom of movement and activities. It also plays a major role in supporting the loved ones of people with dementia, enabling them to be present throughout the progression of the condition while also caring for their own health. We can also greatly influence the community by fostering understanding, acceptance, and supporting the lives of people with dementia in their home environment. In such a context, innovation and interdisciplinary cooperation is more important than ever in creating a long-lived society that is supportive of people with dementia.

Who Is This Lecture For?

The event is open to academics, researchers, practitioners, students, and all those interested in ageing, care, dementia, and the future of long-lived societies.

Author Bio

Anamarija Kejžar is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Work, University of Ljubljana, where she teaches and conducts research in the fields of long-term care, dementia care, palliative care, and social innovation. Her work focuses on the development of innovative, community-based, and integrated approaches to care for older adults and people living with dementia. She has coordinated and implemented numerous pilot projects and innovative practices in institutional and community care, contributing to the development of dementia-friendly living environments, non-pharmacological interventions, and integrated care models centred on dignity and quality of life. She is actively involved in international and interdisciplinary collaborations related to ageing, dementia, palliative care, assistive technologies, and long-term care innovation. In addition to her academic work, she is the producer of the documentary film Don’t Forget Me, focusing on life with dementia in care homes.

Inspire Research Series @ FSAS

At FSAS, we believe that research becomes stronger when ideas and people meet. Inspire Research Series @ FSAS was created as a space for dialogue, reflection, and inspiration, at the intersection of departments, study lines, and generations of researchers, but also as a framework in which research is understood not only as a final performance, but as a living practice that concerns each of us in our identity as academic staff.

Through lectures, discussions, and workshops delivered by distinguished invited speakers – from Romania and from abroad – this series aims to make us more aware of the ways in which we think, write, and share knowledge. It invites us to take a step back – or perhaps sideways – in order to set ourselves in motion within a space of critically examining our own ways of doing research, of deconstructing expectations related to performance, productivity, and “outcomes,” and of reactivating the seeker within us (of data, of meaning), the resilient form of the active researcher. It is an invitation to allow ourselves to be inspired and transformed by the diversity of ways of doing, imagining, and living research – with all its challenges, uncertainties, and satisfactions.

Whether it is about publishing in international journals, about academic writing as a process of thinking, about the ethics and politics of knowledge production, about creative and interdisciplinary methods, about slow research, deep work, social impact and public sociology, about research projects that are desired, ongoing, or only just imaginable, about diverse and pressing themes, or about the ways in which artificial intelligence is transforming academic work, Inspire Research Series aims to create connections and to activate thought. Beyond disciplines, beyond borders, beyond different ways of relating to research, and beyond our own academic trajectories.