Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Cordula Endter
(Catholic University of Applied Social Sciences Berlin)
Irene Götz (LMU Munich)
Valerie Keller (University of Zurich)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel Roundtable
- Stream:
- Intersectionality
- Sessions:
- Thursday 24 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Old age is a strongly regulated life phase in which individual practices, bodies, and cultural images are influenced by social orders and policies of age. The panel contrasts these normativities with subjective age practices, in which assumptions about age (bodies, minds, materialities) are queered.
Long Abstract:
The transition to "old age" has always been socially, culturally, politically, and economically standardized; how one grows old, still depends strongly on the cultural concepts, social practices, political regulations, and economic conditions of a certain milieu and time. Whereas until the mid-20th century elderly people were all in all expected to withdraw from social life (and did so due to being exhausted after a comparatively unhealthy working life), today they are confronted with the overall idea of "active aging", that is, still bringing their potential into society, be it as informal carers, volunteers, or employees who must supplement their pensions. How do elderly women and men deal with these expectations? How do they resist the social expectations of old age? How do they undermine political regulations and cultural images of age? What resources are available to them and in how far does gender and sociocultural background matter?
The panel examines the (subversive) practices of older people with which they queer the images, norms, and policies of old age that are directed at them. Invited are presentations that critically examine age, body, materiality, and discourses and ask about the other spaces, practices, narratives, and images of aging that disrupt the hegemony of old age as the Other and Abject and instead emphasize the agency of older people.
As we want to foster the discussion about the transformation of old age in aging societies and address a wider public, we apply for a panel with a round table discussion.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 24 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how age-dissimilar couples in Australia imagine their futures together. It shows how notions of love and age endure and are being revolutionised. For instance, love was thought to transcend age differences for some but not others, to be focused on the present yet long-lasting.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines how people in age-dissimilar relationships—older-man and older-woman couplings with large age differences—imagine or ignore their joint futures in terms of old age and love. While median age differences in marriages have decreased in Australia and much of the world in recent decades, there has been a rise in relationships with large age differences. In such relationships, one partner will reach old age markedly earlier than the other. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with women and men in heterosexual, age-dissimilar relationships in Australia, this paper explores couples’ imagined futures.
Couples conceived of their ages as meaningless or relative, and argued that chronology did not determine their or their partners’ ages. Rather, appearance, experience, personality, and how old they felt took precedence, making them relatively ‘mature’ or ‘young’ for their age. They thus argued that their relationships were actually age similar. Yet conversations about what would happen when one partner reached old age exposed problems in this discourse, and anxieties about old age and care in their future love lives.
These discussions about the future highlighted tensions in their understandings of age and love. Love was thought to transcend differences in age for some but not others, to be focused on the present yet long-lasting. This complicates popular conceptions wherein age is seen as relative and malleable, and relationships as fulfilling, temporary, and utilitarian. It shows how notions of love and age both endure and are being revolutionised in contemporary Australian relationships.
Paper short abstract:
In the public debate, descriptions of deficits, cognitive losses and incompetence of people with dementia often predominate. It is overlooked to what extent people with dementia do something for themselves and others. The presentation will provide a more detailed insight.
Paper long abstract:
In the public debate, descriptions of deficits, cognitive losses and incompetence of people with dementia often predominate. It is often overlooked that and to what extent people with dementia do, or try to do, something for themselves and others. The planned lecture is dedicated to this thematic context and presents results from the research project "Self-care in the face of dementia in the horizon of spiritual care and cultural science". The project, which is affiliated with the University of Zurich, will examine practices through which people with dementia have a shaping influence on their lives and their social and cultural environment. It examines how people with dementia seek to realize subjective needs, how they care about relationships with other people and how they look for tasks that give them meaning in life. Although the project focuses on practices of self-care, it should not be viewed in isolation, but always as part of a social environment in which self-care and care-giving are closely intertwined.
Based on participatory observations and narrative interviews with people with dementia, the presentation will address the following questions: How does self-care manifest itself in the face of dementia? How can self-care react to shifts in dependency and power relationships? Which forms of self-care can be used to respond to a certain exclusion from one's own life contexts, and how can people with dementia react to social stigmatization?
Paper short abstract:
In an aging country as France, biomedicine focuses on the prevention of chronic diseases and promotes an “active” or “successful” aging. Nevertheless the simple presence of elderly migrants menaces the legitimacy of prevention and revels the increasingly and powerful medicalization of aging.
Paper long abstract:
Contemporary medical anthropologists used the Foucauldian concept of biopower to understand the professional authority of biomedicine to define the limits between normal and pathological aging (Rose 2006, Lock 2013, Pasquarelli 2018). Following this critical approach, I propose to analyze the social notion of aging in contemporary society. In this context, the promotion of health imposes a peculiar political technology on individuals and populations which focuses on the prevention of chronic diseases in order to manage their “active” or “successful” aging. My proposal arises from my latest researches in medical anthropology. With a workfield mainly based in urban agglomerations between the central districts of Paris and the Department of Seine-Saint-Denis, they allow us to consider the first-generation migrants, especially from Maghreb, as double suspected to be potential transgressors of biomedical rules: because of their ageing and cultural origins. According to Fassin (2002), this point of view risks to reduce the migrant’s health only to his cultural aspects and the migrant himself to the prototype of the absolute otherness. Instead, the migrants I interviewed have integrated into their own system of knowledge the biomedical perspective on aging and used hybrid and culturally heterogeneous meanings to understand their personal ageing as normal or pathological. Nevertheless, the simple presence of different forms of aging menaces the socio-cultural and historical context in which the urgency of prevention of chronic disease was burn and revels the emergence of a bio-politics of the self, based on the increasingly medicalization of aging.
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research the paper presents a case study of a senior centre in Bratislava. Its closure and replacement by a crèche triggered a for the Slovak environment unprecedented reaction of ageivistic activities (Doron 2018) initiated by its senior clients and community concerned.
Paper long abstract:
The paper presents a case study of a senior centre in Bratislava, where I conducted ethnographic research: participant observation and in-depth interviews with the clients, their family members, personnel and broader community of neighbours (2017 - 2020). Its closure and replacement by a crèche reveal many characteristic features of development in society in nowadays Slovakia: the younger generation's lack of interest in life in old age, negative public discourse related to the "war of generations" (Johnson et al. 1989), existing ageist stereotypes and the tendency of the decision-makers to decide about the seniors' matters without their participation. For more than twenty years of its existence (1994 - 2017), the senior centre has provided its clients with a home-like environment, care and meaningful activities, as well as social contacts outside their relatives. It enabled seniors to function according to the then-unknown concept of ageing in place. In 2017, the report on plans for its abolition triggered a for the Slovak environment unprecedented reaction initiated by the senior clients and the community concerned. First in the form of a meeting with the mayor, later in the form of a petition and finally, a demonstration organised by the senior clients, their relatives and members of the neighbourhood community. Their efforts were not successful. Nonetheless, the community continues with their ageivistic activities (Doron 2018) at the level of the symbolic community (Cohen 1985), due to the pandemic often even in the virtual world (e.g. dancing circles etc.).
Paper short abstract:
Digital Care Technologies can foster autonomy, but they also reshape the sociocultural understanding of age and care. The paper examines how age and autonomy are reconfigured in the emergence of digital care technologies in older people’s homes and everyday lives.
Paper long abstract:
The digitisation of age has become a central field of innovation and active ageing policies. Therein, autonomy-enabling technologies should (1) support older people in ageing in place independently, (2) meet the growing needs for care at home, and (3)reduce the work load of caregivers. Therein, they seem to be cost-reductionist instruments and at the same time they present a promising sales market. What is left out in this narration is the question, how age and care are reconfigured by the implementation and use of digital care technologies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork the paper takes on a microanalytical perspective following the practices of users* and technologies in their everyday negotiation of what it means to become old with the help of digital care technologies. The ethnographic description points out the affective, embodied and intra-active practices of both older users* and technology, in which new spaces of age and care are co-produced. In these sociomaterial entanglements age and care are fluid phenomena depending on subjectivity, materiality and power. From a feminist cultural anthropologist perspective, the paper suggests how age and care can be thought of differently by bringing the practices and subjectivities of older users* into sight and give them a voice in the discourse of innovation and active ageing policies.