Paper short abstract:

This paper describes how a Facebook group of Australians and New Zealanders with Parkinson’s Disease construct hope online. Using the concept of “therapeutic citizenship,” I examine the creative, productive, and exclusionist potential of collective imaginings of the future.

Paper long abstract:

This paper describes how a group of retired Australians and New Zealanders with Parkinson’s Disease drew on hopeful technologies to imagine futures online during 2020. Through online campaigns for public provision of medications, seminars on technologies such as Deep Brain Stimulation, and the sharing of questions, advice and experiences, this group of people with Parkinson’s Disease stretched and shaped the boundaries of possible futures. Hope emerged in the form of a “therapeutic citizenship,” through the practices and expectations of belonging to the Facebook group. In this sense, hope becomes something embodied and practiced, something one does in the active sense, rather than an intangible thing one imagines. These projects of hope involved specific expectations and responsibilities, ways of knowing and acting, and ethical orientations towards the future. Through the fashioning of a “therapeutic citizenship,” the Facebook group enabled some persons to age and live well with Parkinson’s Disease, constructing not only the “kinds of lives for which one can hope,” but defining who can hope for what. I suggest that viewing hope in the context of retirement and chronic illness brings into perspective projects of hope extending beyond those for the self or individual; that are influenced by local and global, political, and economic forces; and that are imbued with creative and productive – as much as exclusionary – potential.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the plurality of contributions and life choices of older adults in Europe. It analyses the meaning of hope and anticipation in the cyclical temporality of work, ageing, self-identification and leaving a legacy in a transgenerational vision of life and death.

Paper long abstract:

Retirement as the end of employed work is often understood as a transformative moment in a linear process of the life course. With it, one’s financial situation changes, individual goals transform and the givenness of social relationships is taken away as a condition of everyday life. At the same time, looking at the diverse forms in which older adults can and do participate in their societies and communities, including paid work, volunteering, household and family labour, puts into question the concept as a one for all fit. Not recognising the many abilities, skills, and ideas of those in “the Third Age”, however, misses to recognise their societal contributions, the cultural construction of ageing, and the importance of senior citizens’ expectations for the future.

Based on findings from our long-term research with 96 people aged 65+, this paper looks at the plurality of contributions and life choices of older adults in Europe to analyse the meaning of hope and anticipations. Presenting three individual life stories to exemplify the spectrum of future visions and activities in the later life course, we argue for unsettling the category of retirement by engaging with the cyclical temporality of work, ageing and self-identification as well as the importance to leave a legacy in a transgenerational vision of life and death. Through comparisons we show that hope in later life is not an individual achievement but depends in large parts on existing conditions for the possibility of looking forward to the future approached with anticipation.

Paper short abstract:

This study of English former mining and milling towns extends Gramsci’s observation that industry is “a specific mode of….thinking and feeling life”. In post-industrial times older people’s conceptualisations of the future remain conditioned by the forms of production experienced in working life.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reports on the latest stage in a long-term comparative ethnographic study of the affective traces, or ‘afterlives’ of different forms of the social organisation of production in the lives of older people in post-industrial England. Early research considered the impacts of the group-based and person-centred forms of production in mining and milling respectively on conceptualisations of care and of death and dying. Later research considered their impacts on conceptualisations of a series of political phenomena, especially Brexit and the Red Wall, within which the older populations of post-industrial England have been key agents. This presentation explores relationships between the afterlives of different forms of the social organisation of production and the hopes (or the lack of them) that older people have for local communities and local younger people. I observe a marked contrast between mining and milling areas in older people’s conceptualisations of the effects of the increasing normalcy of precarious forms of employment. Crudely, while in the former it is presented as an existential threat to community life, in the latter it is presented as an opportunity for the resurgence of a latent local entrepreneurialism. The paper’s conclusions echo Gramsci’s celebrated observation that industry is “a specific mode….of thinking and feeling life”. I argue that this still stands in times of post-industry. However, and by way of de-essentializing, I argue also that the ways in which older people envisage the future are conditioned significantly by the specific forms of production they experienced in their working lives.

Paper short abstract:

Future orientation among peasants in northeast Brazil not only mitigates radical uncertainties, but assimilates into people’s life expectations the fact of rural old age pensions, a non-contributory benefit for rural workers and small-scale farmers.

Paper long abstract:

The future orientation of peasants along the north-eastern coast of Brazil could be captured by the concept of 'esperar' – to wait while hoping . The specific future orientation captured by this polysemic concept not only mitigates uncertainties (L’Estoile 2014). Rather, it assimilates into people’s life expectations the fact (a certainty, if they live that long) of rural old age pensions (aposentadoria rural) – a non-contributory benefit for rural workers and small-scale farmers . Those shortly before their retirement imagine that when they start receiving pensions, a kind of good life finally begins. For most, this is indeed the first time that their monthly income becomes stable, regular and reaches minimum-wage levels. It is spoken of as a right and does not depend on a boss: Those imagining their retirement say that they will work for nobody anymore and ‘they will finally work for themselves’. Once their pensions are approved, people also invariably apply for consigned loans, which marks their entry into the mass-consumption society as ‘financially-included’ citizens and turns them into new centres of financial flows within their households and communities.

Paper short abstract:

Many Chinese urbanites who grew up during the collective era encounter their first opportunity to pursue personal fulfillment when they retire. This paper argues that China’s transformed social landscape allows retirees greater agency to cultivate new ways of growing older.

Paper long abstract:

For many in urban China, retirement presents the first opportunity in their lives to cultivate interests and pursue personal fulfillment. Those who have retired in the past two decades belong to China’s “lost generation.” They endured the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution in their childhoods, spent their youths undergoing forced “reeducation” in rural areas, and toiled at demanding jobs to support their children in an increasingly competitive society. Despite the fact that retirement is mandated by age rather than voluntarily chosen, many of my interlocutors tell me that it offers their first taste of freedom.

This paper investigates the efforts of Chinese retirees to live meaningful lives on their own terms while contending with family obligations and a paternalistic state that seeks to extend its control from the cradle to the grave. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research on the everyday lives of retired women in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, my paper examines how retirees leverage emerging expectations about self-reliance to create hobbies, join interest groups, and imagine new ways of growing old that challenge traditional expectations. I focus in particular on the popular collective dancing phenomenon, in which millions of retired women gather to dance and socialize in public areas. Ultimately, I argue that the reorganization of the relationships between the individual, the family, and the state has upended the traditional moral order. While this destabilized social landscape presents many challenges, it also allows Chinese retirees greater agency over how they want to spend their retirement years.