Prof Aagje Swinnen (A.M.C.)

Aagje M. C. Swinnen is a full professor in Aging Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, where she also chairs the Department of Literature and Art. She is originally trained as a literary scholar (obtained her PhD at Ghent University, Belgium, in 2004) and has grown her areas of expertise in the last twenty years into the fields of critical age(ing) and dementia studies. 

Swinnen has explored representations of aging and dementia in literature, photography, and film and the ways in which they constitute knowledge, identities, and bodies in specific historical contexts and power relations. In addition to the narrative and visual analysis of texts in the broadest sense of the term, she has also looked at lay readers’ responses to literary excerpts, elicited through book clubs and Shared Reading sessions, to enhance our understanding of their experiences of and attitudes to aging. 

Swinnen's projects and collaborations serve to debunk certain cultural myths about older age, from the perceived asexuality of older people to the problematic equation of dementia with the loss of personhood, and to identify and develop counter-narratives. To this end, she uses artistic means, for example creative writing exercises and speculative workshops. Swinnen is trained in and has employed the research methods of ethnography and close listening in combination with two types of creative arts approaches to dementia care, namely TimeSlips and The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project. These approaches were first developed in the United States (by Prof. Anne Basting and Gary Glazner respectively) and Swinnen has worked with several societal partners to implement some of their guiding principles in the context of psychogeriatric care in the Netherlands.