Journal of Aging Studies最新文献

Home, as a physical place and psychological construct, is often thought of as being an important locus of ontological security across the life course. However, there is a growing awareness of a darker side to the home (see Gurney, 2021), and home-unmaking practices (see Baxter and Brickell, 2014) that challenge the assumptions of home being purely a place of shelter, comfort, and control and instead foreground the temporal, material, and spatial fluidity of the home, and tensions between privacy and the ability to engage in health-harming behaviours largely unnoticed. Here, a material gerontological approach enables a rethinking of how home, and the household objects contained within, can both promote and undermine well-being as we age.

Drawing from two qualitative studies, this paper focuses on the tensions created by the materiality of a home which can both support daily life (see Coleman et al., 2016) and the project of the self (Belk, 1988) and be at the heart of harmful behaviours and more risky living environments. The first study explores the experiences of older women living alone during the Covid-19 pandemic. It explores how, over time, the ontological security of home can be challenged as a result of events such as bereavement, changes to physical capabilities and external influences such as the Covid-19 pandemic. The meaning and materiality of home become reframed, through the lens of gender and age, during the lockdowns associated with the pandemic. The second study, examining a voluntary service supporting older people to declutter, shows how the reduction of possessions can help clear space for adaptations to the home, reduce chances of slips and falls, and create opportunities for therapeutic engagements with the past through reminiscence, but can also threaten the ‘affective scaffolding’ of the home.

These two studies illustrate the ways that materiality is enrolled in perceived and experienced tensions between the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to age at home. The paper argues for greater acknowledgement of the grey area between idealised imaginings of the materiality of home and actual everyday experiences of ‘living with things’ (Gregson, 2007) in later life.

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.