Aging Studies

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Latest release: May 31, 2024
Series
20
Books
The Ages of Life: Living and Aging in Conflict?
Book 3·Mar 2014
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$32.99
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.
Aged Young Adults: Age Readings of Contemporary American Novels and Films
Book 4·Apr 2014
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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 for characters who are in their twenties and thirties and challenges often-quoted labels such as late-coming-of-age story or perpetual adolescence.
Alive and Kicking at All Ages: Cultural Constructions of Health and Life Course Identity
Book 5·Jun 2014
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The linking of age and ill-health is part of a cultural narrative of decline as age is often defined as the absence of good health. Research has shown that we are aged by culture, but we are also culturally made ill when we age. The cultural ambiguity of aging can thus deconstruct negative images of old age as physical decrepitude. This volume investigates the topic of health within the matrix of time and experience by addressing issues such as how our understanding of health influences our notion of agency within a subversive deconstruction of normative age concepts, and what role the notion of health plays in such an interaction.
Popularizing Dementia: Public Expressions and Representations of Forgetfulness
Book 6·Nov 2015
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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.
Serializing Age: Aging and Old Age in TV Series
Book 7·Dec 2015
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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.
Traces of Aging: Old Age and Memory in Contemporary Narrative
Book 9·May 2016
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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.
Alter(n) als soziale und kulturelle Praxis: Ordnungen - Beziehungen - Materialitäten
Book 10·Feb 2017
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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.
Aging in Slavic Literatures: Essays in Literary Gerontology
Book 11·Jul 2017
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$48.99
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.
A Senior Moment: Cultural Mediations of Memory and Ageing
Book 12·Jun 2020
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$44.99
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.
Senior Tourism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging and Traveling
Book 13·Aug 2017
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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.
Care Home Stories: Aging, Disability, and Long-Term Residential Care
Book 14·Mar 2018
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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.
Embodied Narration: Illness, Death and Dying in Modern Culture
Book 15·Aug 2018
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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.
Re-discovering Age(ing): Narratives of Mentorship
Book 16·Jul 2019
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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.
Aging and Self-Realization: Cultural Narratives about Later Life
Book 17·Nov 2018
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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.
Imagining Ageing: Representations of Age and Ageing in Anglophone Literatures
Book 18·Oct 2018
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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.
Foreign Countries of Old Age: East and Southeast European Perspectives on Aging
Book 19·Jan 2021
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$54.99
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.
Empowering the Elderly?: How ›Help to Self-Help‹ Health Interventions Shape Ageing and Eldercare in Denmark
Book 20·Jul 2020
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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.
Masculinities Ageing between Cultures: Relationality, Kinship and Care in Dialogue
Book 21·May 2024
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Global mobility is one of the crucial phenomena of our time. Combining the theoretical frameworks of masculinity studies and age studies, the contributors to this volume examine the intersection of cultural exchange, gender and age, exploring ageing masculinities with reference to the key concepts of relationality, kinship and care. The essays analyze transcultural experiences of ageing men from Europe, relationships including the Indian diaspora in the US, Chinese father images in the US-American context and Black British queer kinship, drawing its examples also from Brazilian society and African European contexts.
Gender and Age/Aging in Popular Culture: Representations in Film, Music, Literature, and Social Media
Book 22·Jun 2023
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As social spaces are culturally diverse and digitally networked, the reality of our lives is shaped by processes of globalization and digitization. This leads to the question of whether popular cultures enable or impede (inter-)cultural exchange and global communication. To explore this, the contributors to this volume analyze representations of the intersections of gender and age/ing in cultural and media consumption, such as literature, film, music, and social media. The interconnectedness between gender and aging has been evident since the 1990s and enabled the recognition of age as a cultural category - now is the time to take this intersectional analysis further.
Extraordinary Forms of Aging: Life Narratives of Centenarians and Children with Progeria
Book 23·Oct 2022
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While aging and the life-course appear to be normalized processes, the complex construction of age at the intersection of biology, society, and culture remains opaque. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of age(ing) by exploring its construction through the analysis of extraordinary cases. Focusing on life narratives of centenarians and children with progeria, Julia Velten analyzes the way in which these people experience age(ing) and shows how these experiences can contribute to our understanding of age. Situated at the intersection of aging studies and medical humanities, the study explores what extraordinary age(ing) can tell us about aging processes in general.

Latest releases

Masculinities Ageing between Cultures: Relationality, Kinship and Care in Dialogue
Heike Hartung
Book 21
Free

Free of charge

Care Home Stories: Aging, Disability, and Long-Term Residential Care
Sally Chivers
Book 14•Medicine
Free
Aging and Self-Realization: Cultural Narratives about Later Life
Hanne Laceulle
Book 17
Free
Imagining Ageing: Representations of Age and Ageing in Anglophone Literatures
Carmen Concilio
Book 18
Free
Masculinities Ageing between Cultures: Relationality, Kinship and Care in Dialogue
Heike Hartung
Book 21
Free
Gender and Age/Aging in Popular Culture: Representations in Film, Music, Literature, and Social Media
Nicole Haring
Book 22
Free
Extraordinary Forms of Aging: Life Narratives of Centenarians and Children with Progeria
Julia Velten
Book 23
Free