March 12th HCN Research Seminar Series

Details below for the next event in the UCL Health Communication Network’s seminar series on 12th March, 2024 1-2pm.

For our next seminar we are excited to announce a guest speaker, Dr. Emma Putland, joining us from Lancaster University. As such, we will be holding an online-only event.

Location: Online only

Joining link: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/95401339303?pwd=dkVuOVVCR1dubWp5d1N4bytJYUhZQT09 (701285)

Invited Speaker:
• What do you associate with “dementia”? Representing dementia in popular media, AI outputs and in conversation with people affected by dementia.
Emma Putland (Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University)

Recognising that how we communicate about health can both reflect and help to shape social attitudes and practices, this talk focuses on how dementia is represented amongst various spheres of public life. It begins by briefly contextualising some of the main ways that dementia and people with the syndrome are represented in contemporary UK culture, with a particular focus on popular media. Building on this, the talk considers how artificial intelligence (AI) models might generate images and character descriptions in response to dementia-oriented textual prompts, examining the social biases that are reproduced and sometimes even amplified by AI outputs. Finally, the talk reflects on the above representations in relation to conversations with fifty-one participants who were living with dementia, care partners and close family/friends. Here, the plurality of people’s representations of dementia and the people affected is evident, and the talk concludes with participant-informed recommendations for changing dementia representations to help challenge stigma and better reflect individuals’ lived realities.