The Memory Project is a research / intervention which was carried out in the wake of a reflection on Active Ageing during the European Year for Active Ageing (decisione 940/2011/EU). The project was promoted and financed by the Councillorship of Social Policy of the Municipality of Naples. Memory examines the activation processes of institutionalized elderly who have limited mobility capacity. The research query revolves around a central question: what could it mean to be active for subjects residing in a residential building and confined to a wheelchair or a bed? The objective, therefore, is to promote storytelling as a practice of activation in these subjects.
Starting from this question, this project shows the narration (Demetrio 1995, 2008) as a "place" of subjective activation. So, the narration will be reread through the paradigm of practice studies (Bruni, Gherardi 2007, Gherardi 2008) and considered as a practical activity, mediated by body, objects, artifacts, language and rules. So, the narration will be proposed as a unit of analysis for the study of the narration as a practice of activation.
Activation has already become a key word in the planning of social policies. The necessity to innovate social policies by striving to promote the citizens' abilities of empowerment is widely sustained. The Memory project suggests that this innovation can also go through the development of a narrative knowledge (Bruner 1986). Therefore, it proposes a theoretical key useful to widen the semantic space of concept of activation by making it usable in different ambits and by justifying new intervention modalities in the field social policies. The aim of this work is giving knowledge to people acting in social policies, by giving the first place relevance to the centrality of subjects thanks to activation processes.
The objective to be investigated is a dynamic one. Therefore we used a dynamic research approach, the paradigm of the Mobilities Method (2011), which permits theorizing the social world as a wide range of economic, social and political practices. Researching the social world through a mobilities paradigm can provide new understanding of what these practices are.
A mobile research practice was adopted that foresaw the involvement of the researcher. In order to focus on the unit of analysis, the activation, it became necessary to come and go...enter, dwell and leave the field of research, thereby, entering into a rapport with the subjects.
The research was conducted by a multidisciplinary team composed of two sociologists, a psychologist and two social workers. It was carried out in a public city residence for woman that housed eighty elderly subjects which were or were not self-sufficient. The number of subjects participating in the workshop were 16, ranging in age from 65 to 91 and not capable of leaving the building due to their reduced psychomotorial functional capacities.
The workshop of autobiographical storytelling had a duration of four meetings for each group, stimulating the participants to remember personal events through different inputs. Colored pictures, personal photos, music, markers and various everyday objects were used by the research group to "do activities together" and provoke the recalling process.
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