Journal of Aging Studies最新文献

This article aims to demonstrate a concrete example of how to apply an intersectional life course perspective into the study of ageing migrant women. The empirical material is based on a qualitative in-depth interview study conducted with 20 Turkish-born women who have migrated to Sweden in their early to mid-adulthood years. Despite increasing urgings from gerontologists to include intersectionality in studies on migrants, research often neglects how age, gender, and migration status interact, failing to recognise the diverse experiences of racialised older migrants. The analysis shows that the intersection of age, gender and migrancy generates racialised and gendered experiences of later life which renders the women in different positions of power. The analysis also reveals the importance of agential capacity through the mobilisation of resources, negotiation, and resistance. By cross-fertilising two perspectives, the study suggests that intersectional life course could shed light on the experiences of ageing migrant women, thus, sensitising gerontological research to diversity and heterogeneity.

Although LGTBIQ+ groups have experienced social transformations towards greater levels of respect and public presence in Chile in recent decades, the life trajectories of older people remain marginal in studies and surveys regarding sexual and gender diversity. In a society where homophobia is a current and oppressive attitude despite important advances, it is essential to examine the experiences of older LGBTIQ+ people, especially because they are vulnerable to dual discrimination in old age owing to a combination of homophobia and ageism. This study involved an analysis of social ties based on the Convoy Model, to understand how different life courses have influenced the structuring of social networks in old age among gay men and trans women in Chile. Framed within the context of broader research into four axes of diversity in ageing, this study reports the results of thirteen biographies of older people (ten gay men and three trans women). In-depth interviews were conducted using a biographical approach in which the social links that accompany the life course are deepened. A thematic analysis strategy was applied and the interview data were processed through NVivo. The findings show three concentric circles surrounding the participants: closest (made up of partner, immediate family and chosen family), closer (made up biological and extended family) and close (made up of peers and neighbours). The older people are integrated into social networks with diverse compositions, share closeness and intimacy, receive emotional, informational and instrumental social support, and are active providers of reciprocal support. However, the study notes certain risk factors, such as the difficulty of cohabiting and maintaining relationships with a partner. Participants living alone reported fearing an absence of instrumental support during more advanced stages of the ageing process.

In this paper, we explore the seeming stability of aging. More precisely, we offer an empirical account of how aging – images of aging, embodiments of aging, feelings about aging – is enacted in company practice, both in place and across time. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at SMCare, a small-to-medium sized company active in the care technology sector, we show how aging achieves its stability not through practices that are characterized by affection, or purposefully targeted at maintaining or caring for aging, but due to ongoing re-enactments in the shadows of other care practices. In so doing, we mobilize STS care literature that foregrounds the often-invisible relationships among objects that are otherwise neglected, marginalized and excluded. In particular, we interrogate the interlinkages between aging and caring practices as emerging in the shadows of care. In these blind spots, we find, certain unloved and disliked objects such as aging may aggregate and grow, becoming stable and durable as they are incidentally brought into existence, drawing energy from, and feeding off, other care practices.

Precursors of loneliness include individual risk factors and experiences of social exclusion. Using the New Zealand Health Work and Retirement Life Course History Study, we investigated the impact of unequal access to material resources across the life course (from age 10 to present) on late life emotional and social loneliness and the moderating effects of gender and Māori ethnicity (indigenous population of Aotearoa/New Zealand) in 613 adults aged 65 to 81 years. Childhood and adult life socioeconomic status (SES) negatively predicted late life emotional and social loneliness, but their effects disappeared after controlling for late life SES, suggesting a mediation effect. Education was also a significant predictor; however, it exerted different effects on social (positive) and emotional (negative) loneliness. Education's effect was moderated by gender, indicating a protective effect for emotional and an exacerbating effect for social loneliness in men. These findings suggest that lifelong exclusion from material resources is a risk factor for late life loneliness.

Philip Dormer Stanhope (1694–1773), 4th Earl of Chesterfield, is both a witness of and an agent in the most important transformations in eighteenth-century England. While his Letters to His Son and Letters to His Godson have been examined in the context of his advice on polite behavior, ‘the art of pleasing’ and masculinity, Chesterfield's correspondence has not been fully explored in terms of its conceptualization of late life. Since the proper performance of aging and observance of its decorum are part and parcel of polite conduct, the management of this psychosomatic phenomenon is a valuable part of lessons on deportment. This essay offers to address the question of aging into old age in the Earl's correspondence, seeing it as Chesterfield's purposeful but also unconscious pedagogic life project directed at his correspondents, making his collection of letters a type of eighteenth-century attempt at geragogy. His is an honest account of what aging into old age and with illness entails which makes his letters both a warning and a blueprint for others to learn from.

Managing older software code, often referred to as legacy code, entails a great deal of complexity, as the longer a software system has been around, the more likely it has been subjected to revisions and has grown in its interdependencies to other components written at different times by different people. This can lead to software being seen as aging and in decline as it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. At the same time, writing new lines of code or updating to new platforms, languages, and software tools, can also be positioned as a means to rejuvenate organizational work, acting as a salve to overcome hardware limitations, or other forms of stagnation. Software is thus discursively figured as immaterial and atemporal, on the one hand, and as excessively material and corporeal, on the other. This duality of software means that the figuring of software's decline is highly subjective and rife with normative tropes that distinguish between forms of software change that that are desirable and those that are unwanted, what is worthy of maintenance or should be abandoned, what systems are considered aging versus evolving and enduring. This article considers how, in practice, software developers and engineers understand the aging of software. How and when is software coded as aged and old, what is at stake in these delineations, and what do these stakes surface about temporal regimes of software work? Through close readings of software engineering discourse and ethnographic vignettes, I examine how software's aging is figured through age coded tropes, and how these in turn contribute to the chrononormativities of software maintenance. I show how tropes of aging software are associated with the abject, excess, and grotesque, and with existing gendered hierarchies in software work that privilege atemporal and ahistorical relationships to code.

The lives and deaths of animals living with humans have become increasingly medicalised, and the life of a pet usually ends with euthanasia conducted by a veterinarian. In this paper, I explore how pet euthanasia is understood as a good death in interactions between vets and pet guardians in veterinary practice, provided as an act of care for old and seriously ill or injured animals. Drawing from interviews with vets in Finland, I discuss the ways in which care and control are negotiated in the decisions and practices concerning pet euthanasia, and their implications on understandings of old age and death in animals. I approach the task of euthanising an animal without a prospect of continuing life in Aristotelian terms as phronesis, as knowledge about the right and appropriate ways to act in a certain situation.

Centenarians are of particular importance to aging research as they represent the living architype of exceptional longevity and as such studying their attributes is expected to contribute to one's understanding of survivorship. While much centenarian research to date recognizes the biological and genetic determinants in achieving advanced age, there is a lack of understanding regarding the influence of social factors and their role in aging. As centenarian populations continue to grow at an unprecedented rate, the heterogeneity among centenarian cohorts together with current aging trends highlights the intrinsic need to better understand centenarian aging from a biopsychosocial perspective. A key challenge for research concerning centenarians is understanding their personal experiences of reaching this momentous age as such information could help to identify the sociodemographic and psychosocial factors that enable people to live such extraordinarily long lives. To address this, this study focused on the lived experience of Irish centenarians and explored their understanding of their aging in a rapidly modernized sociocultural Ireland. Documenting the psychosocial profiles of centenarians will assist key stakeholders including researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in the development of policies and strategies to support the growing population of older adults in Ireland. Furthermore, this research will also map Irish centenarians who have not previously been explored onto the international nexus of centenarian research.

Our qualitative study, consisting of in-depth semi-structured interviews with recent retirees in the Dutch city of Leiden, set out to investigate how communication, through processes of self-identification and the negotiation of social identities, relates to (self-)ageism. A letter from the city administration was used to make age identification salient in our research and prompted stories of various liminal spaces and phases that our participants experienced. Whilst liminal phases are usually considered uncertain and ambiguous, in our study we found that for older people liminality can offer a desired ambiguity that allowed them to adopt a more positive identity than ‘being old’, which was rejected as undesirable. Our findings provide insight into the intertwinement of societal, institutional and individual levels of ageism and highlights the necessity of finding and emphasising positive values in being old, since only then positive interpretations of communication can enable processes of positive societal identification.

Gerontechnology design is often rooted in deficit imaginaries of frail ageing bodies, with little consideration given to the sociomateriality of older adults' everyday lives, as shaped by complex social, political, historical and cultural forces. While co-design approaches have gone some way in supporting the participation of older adults, little attention has been given to how design processes can be responsive to the more-than-human lived materialities of older adults' everyday lives. More generally, there is also a need for deeper ethical engagement with the more-than-human assemblages that shape the politics and practices of co-design. In response, this article sketches out a feminist posthuman praxis of care-full co-design, grounding it in our work co-designing digital cultural experiences with older adults who live along multiple axes of inequality. Drawing on the radically deconstructive and reconstructive commitments of posthuman feminism, the discussion tentatively presents three interconnected threads of care-full co-design. These threads explore our attempts to design in the ‘thick present’, ground design in older adults' more-than-human everyday lives, and negotiate care-full (re)arrangements in the collective doing of design. The threads call for response-ability to expansive timescales and structural injustices, and to the situated knowledges and multi-sensual lifeworlds of older adults. Design is understood as an emergent process of attentive experimentation and adjustment in a bid to find a suitable arrangement of bodies, knowledges, technologies, emotions, languages, design sites and objects. We focus on particular practice-ings, tensions and challenges that emerged as we negotiated our care-full praxis.