Aging Studies

By Amy Clotworthy

Pages: 262
Publication Date: 15 July 2020
ISBN: 978-3-8376-5211-6

Health programmes that offer ›help to self-help‹ are meant to empower ageing adults to remain independent and self-sufficient at home for as long as possible. But what happens when the private home becomes a political realm in which state intervention and individual agency happen simultaneously? Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish municipality, Amy Clotworthy describes how both health professionals and elderly citizens negotiate the political discourses about health and ageing that frame their relational encounter. By elucidating some of the conflicts, paradoxes, and negotiations that occur, she provides important insights into the contemporary organisation of eldercare.

Edited by Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl and Oana Hergenröther

Pages: 390
Publication Date: 5 January 2021
ISBN: 978-3-8376-4554-5

The exploration of what May Sarton calls the »foreign country of old age« usually does not go far beyond the familiar: the focus of aging studies has thus far clearly rested upon North America and Western Europe. This multi-disciplinary essay collection critically examines conditions and representations of old age and aging in Eastern and Southeastern Europe from various perspectives of the humanities and social sciences. By shedding light on these culturally specific contexts, the contributions widen our understanding of the aging process in all its diversity and demonstrate that a shift in perspectives might in fact challenge a number of taken-for-granted positions and presumptions of aging studies.

Edited by Carmen Concilio

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Pages: 212
Publication Date: 17 October 2018
ISBN: 978-3-8376-4426-5

What do literary texts tell us about growing old? The essays in this volume introduce and explore representations of ageing and old age in canonical works of English and postcolonial literature. The contributors examine texts by William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Julian Barnes, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, J.M. Coetzee, Alice Munro, Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace and, together with a medical study, they suggest solutions to the challenges arising from the current demographic change brought about by ageing Western populations.

By Hanne Laceulle

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Pages: 300
Publication Date: 12 November 2018
ISBN: 978-3-8376-4422-7

Dominant cultural narratives about later life dismiss the value senior citizens hold for society. In her cultural-philosophical critique, Hanne Laceulle outlines counter narratives that acknowledge both potentials and vulnerabilities of later life. She draws on the rich philosophical tradition of thought about self-realization and explores the significance of ethical concepts essential to the process of growing old such as autonomy, authenticity and virtue. These counter narratives aim to support older individuals in their search for a meaningful age identity, while they make society recognize its senior members as valued participants and moral agents of their own lives.

Edited by Núria Casado-Gual, Emma Domínguez-Rué, and Maricel Oró-Piqueras

Pages: 186
Publication Date: 27 July 2019
ISBN: 978-3-8376-4396-1

Since Mentor, Telemachus' advisor in Homer's Odyssey, gave name to the figure of the ›wise teacher,‹ fictional representations of mentoring have permeated classic and contemporary cultural texts of different literary genres such as fiction, poetry, and life writing. The contributions of this volume explore wisdom in old age through a series of narratives of mentorship which, either from a critical or a personal perspective, undermine ageist views of later life.

Edited by Heike Hartung

Pages: 260
Publication Date: 16 August 2018
ISBN: 978-3-8376-4306-0

Do liminal embodied experiences such as illness, death and dying affect literary form? In recent years, the concept of embodiment has been theorized from various perspectives. Gender studies have been concerned with the cultural implications of embodiment, arguing to move away from viewing the body as a prediscursive phenomenon to regarding it as an acculturated body. Age studies have extended this view to the embodied experience of ageing, while drawing attention to the ways in which the ageing body, through its materiality and plasticity, restricts the possibilities of (de)constructing subjectivity. These current debates on embodiment find a strong counterpart in literary representation. The contributions to this anthology investigate how and to what extend physical borderline experiences affect literary form.

Edited by Sally Chivers and Ulla Kriebernegg 

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Pages: 310
Publication Date: 29 September 2017
ISBN: 978-3-8376-3805-9

Institutional care for seniors offers a cultural repository for fears and hopes about an aging population. Although enormous changes have occurred in how institutional care is structured, the legacies of the poorhouse still persist, creating panicked views of the nursing home as a dreaded fate. The paradoxical nature of a space meant to be both hospital and home offers up critical tensions for examination by age studies scholars.

The essays in this book challenge stereotypes of institutional care for older adults, illustrate the changes that have occurred over time, and illuminate the continuities in the stories we tell about nursing homes.

Edited by Simone Francescato, Roberta Maierhofer, Valeria Minghetti, and Eva-Maria Trinkaus 

Pages: 210
Publication Date: 1 August 2017
ISBN: 978-3-8376-3703-8

This volume aims to bridge the disciplinary gap between tourism studies and aging studies. It investigates the intersections of tourism and aging from a variety of perspectives that focus on the many ways in which senior tourism is socially constructed and/or individually experienced. The essays tackle key topics ranging from the socio-economic aspects of post-retirement travel to the representations of the traveling elderly in literature, film and media, and the influence of travel on late-life creativity.

Edited by Line Grenier and Fannie Valois-Nadeau 

Pages: 320
Publication Date: 17 September 2020
ISBN: 978-3-8376-3683-3

Ageing and Memory are two cultural processes that establish their own relationships with time. They affect our ways of living, in the present, and for a future, as we move through life.

This book focuses on the cultural mediations of ageing and memory, teasing out their complex and largely unpredictable relationships and interconnections. Its overall purpose is to explore different practices, commodities, daily routines, sounds, images and technologies that configure memory and ageing and shape our experiences of living in time and with time. By covering a variety of phenomena, from biopics, music by elderly, and artefacts among other, this edited collection considers the cultural stuff that ageing and memory are made of and interconnected in singular ways, for and by particular people, in specific socio-historical locations.

Edited by Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl 

Pages: 284
Publication Date: 12 July 2017
ISBN: 978-3-8376-3221-7

In Slavic studies, aging and old age have thus far been only marginal concerns. This volume brings together the scattered research that has been done up to now on aging as represented and narrated in Slavic literatures. The essays investigate Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Slovene and Ukrainian representations of age/aging in various literary genres and epochs and analyze age as a powerful marker of difference and as constitutive of social relations and personal identity.

Edited by Cordula Endter and Sabine Kienitz

Pages: 368
Publication Date: 13 March 2017
ISBN: 978-3-8376-3411-2

Wie wird man eigentlich alt? Können Dinge auch altern? Und wie verändern sich die eigenen biographischen Erfahrungen und der Umgang mit Erinnerung(en)?

Dieser Band rückt die Frage nach den Beziehungen des Alter(n)s ins Zentrum und stellt dabei verschiedene interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf das Altern als soziale Praxis und kulturelle Ordnung vor. Entlang der drei leitenden Begriffe – Ordnungen, Praktiken, Materialitäten – loten die ethnographischen, historischen und diskursorientierten Beiträge kulturelle Vorstellungen, alltagsweltliche Aushandlungen und materielle Erscheinungsformen des Alter(n)s aus.

Edited by Marta Cerezo Moreno and Nieves Pascual Soler

Pages: 192
Publication Date: 24 February 2016
ISBN: 978-3-8376-3439-6

This collection consists of eight essays that examine the way narratives determine our understanding of old age and condition how the experience is lived. Contributors to this volume have based their analysis on the concept of »narrative identity« developed by Paul Ricoeur, built upon the idea that fiction makes life, and on his definition of »trace« as the mark of time. By investigating the traces of aging imprinted in a series of literary and filmic works they dismantle the narrative of old age as decline and foreclosure to assemble one of transformation and growth.

Edited by Maricel Oró-Piqueras and Anita Wohlmann

Pages: 276
Publication Date: 2 December 2015
ISBN: 978-3-8376-3276-7

Serialized storytelling provides intriguing opportunities for critical representations of age and aging. In contrast to the finite character of films, television narratives can unfold across hundreds of episodes and multiple seasons. Contemporary viewing practices and new media technologies have resulted in complex television narratives, in which experimental temporalities and revisions of narrative linearity and chronological time have become key features. As the first of its kind, this volume investigates how TV series as a powerful cultural medium shape representations of age and aging, such as in »Orange Is The New Black«, »The Wire« or »Desperate Housewives«, to understand what it means to live in time.

Edited by Aagje Swinnen and Mark Schweda

Pages: 410
Publication Date: 18 November 2015
ISBN: 978-3-8376-2710-7

How are individual and social ideas of late-onset dementia shaped and negotiated in film, literature, the arts, and the media? And how can the symbolic forms provided by popular culture be adopted and transformed by those affected in order to express their own perspectives? This international and interdisciplinary volume summarizes central current research trends and opens new theoretical and empirical perspectives on dementia in popular culture. It includes contributions by internationally renowned scholars from the humanities, social and cultural gerontology, age(ing) studies, cultural studies, philosophy, and bioethics.

Contributions by Lucy Burke, Marlene Goldman, Annette Leibing and others.

Edited by Ulla Kriebernegg, Roberta Maierhofer, and Barbara Ratzenboeck

Pages: 324
Publication Date: 4 March 2014
ISBN: 978-3-8376-2582-0

Similar to the issue of health that can both be literal and metaphorical, personal and public, human and environmental, age and aging are concepts that are understood according to time, circumstances and disciplinary approach. In this volume, we are asking for papers that investigate the topic of health within the matrix of time and experience. This cultural ambiguity of aging enables an analysis of social functions of images as a basis for interdisciplinary exchange.

Contributions focus on the relationship between living and aging as a productive antagonism, which focus on the interplay between continuity and change as a marker of life course identity:

• What role does the notion of health play in this interaction?
• How does our understanding of health influence our notion of agency within a subversive deconstruction of normative age concepts?
• How can negative images of old age as physical decrepitude and disease be deconstructed?
• Depictions of appreciation of life even in the oldest age as form of "successful frailty".

Edited by Anita Wohlmann

Pages: 280
Publication Date: 13 January 2014
ISBN: 978-3-8376-2483-0

When Toula's father in »My Big Fat Greek Wedding« says to his daughter (age 30) »you look so old« or when Don DeLillo's protagonist (age 28) »feels old« in »Cosmopolis«, these young characters are attributed an age awareness that has received little attention in age studies so far. Leaving aside chronological or biological dimensions of age, this study approaches age as a metaphoric practice, suggesting that »feeling old« is not to be taken literally but metaphorically. The book examines the cultural meanings of age and aging and challenges often-quoted labels such as late-coming-of-age story or perpetual adolescence.

Edited by Ulla Kriebernegg and Roberta Maierhofer

Pages: 256
Publication Date: 2013
ISBN: 978-3-8376-2212-6

The binary construction of »young« and »old«, which is based on a biogerontological model of aging as decline, can be redefined as the ambiguity of aging from a cultural studies perspective. This concept enables an analysis of the social functions of images of aging with the aim of providing a basis for interdisciplinary exchange on gerontological research.

The articles in this publication conceive the relationship between living and aging as a productive antagonism which focuses on the interplay between continuity and change as a marker of life course identity: aging and growing older are processes which cannot be reduced to the chronology of years but which are shaped by the individual's interaction with the changing circumstances of life.

Keywords: Age, Aging, Life Course, Identity, Cultural Gerontology, Concepts of Time, Gender

Edited by Aagje Swinnen and John A Stotesbury

Pages: 208
Publication Date: 2012
Publisher: LIT Verlag
ISBN: 978-3-643-90176-7

In aging studies, age, like other salient markers of identity, is defined not in terms of being but of doing. One adjusts automatically to the implicit norms of age-appropriate behavior that structure everyday life. In Western culture, these norms install a hierarchical dichotomy between the young and the old - the latter still getting the worst of it.

This second volume in the Aging Studies series focuses on questions concerning the ways in which actors and socialites perform aging on the stage of consumerist culture. How do celebrities, whose star personae are ultimately connected with the prime of their lives, cope with the aging process? Which public practices invite subtle adjustment of age scripts that focus on the decline of physical strength and attractiveness as the years pass?

Edited by Heike Hartung and Roberta Maierhofer

Pages: 208
Publication Date: 2008
Publisher: LIT
ISBN: 978-3-8258-1229-4

The prospect of increasing longevity has turned aging and old age into a topic of concern in Western societies. The discourse of age and the proliferation of narrative in contemporary media culture both transgress disciplinary boundaries. Addressing the "narratives of life" from different disciplinary angles this volume aims to explore the scope of a narrative gerontology. Aging and the stories that are told about it or from within are transnational and transcultural phenomena. While aging is thus a universal process, attention is also drawn to the categories of difference.