Journal of Aging Studies

Social gerontology mainly addresses couples' housing arrangements in later life by focusing on partner's care, related adaptations in place, and changing role expectations within the couple relationship. Thereby, the resulting image does not fully represent today's diversity of couples' housing arrangements. This article considers housing arrangement and relationship orientation of older couples as entangled in social practice, providing a broader perspective on the diversity and dynamics of couples living arrangements in later life...

There is increasing interest across European contexts in promoting active social lives in older age, and counteracting pathways and outcomes related to social isolation and loneliness for men and women in later life. This is evidenced within national and European level policy, including the 2021 Green Paper on Ageing and its concern with understanding how risks can accrue for European ageing populations in the relational sphere. Research indicates that life-course transitions can function as a source of these risks, leading to a range of potentially exclusionary impacts for the social relations of older men and women...

The aim of this qualitative, phenomenological study was to understand how older adults cope with experiences of ageism and racism through an intersectional lens. Twenty adults 60+ residing in the U.S. Mountain West who identified as Black, Hispanic/Latino(a), Asian-American/Pacific Islander, Indigenous, or White participated individually in a one-hour, semi-structured interview. A team of five coders engaged in an inductive coding process through independent coding followed by critical discussion. Peer debriefing enhanced credibility...

In this paper, I develop features of a material gerontology which are summarised in the concept of "distributed age(ing);" that is, age(ing) that is distributed across and co-constituted through meanings, roles, and identities, as well as human and non-human forms of materiality, their productive dimensions and their relations to each other. The starting point is the critique of the human-centredness of gerontological approaches and, thus, the lack of a systematic conceptual consideration of non-human forms of materiality and agency in the context of age(ing)...

Through close readings of three Indian short stories, this essay seeks to show how cherished possessions, such as a bed, a blanket and books, are not stable repositories of past memories but a means of materializing intergenerational relations within the family in the lived present and, perhaps even more interestingly, catalysts for new and hitherto unforeseen possibilities of self-discovery and connections with the world beyond. Part of the apparatus of self-care that older people can summon in the moment to supplement their selfhood, objects as presented in these stories appear to exceed their limited understanding as passive recipients of externally imposed meaning, with their complex and unstable signification finally shown to emerge through their mutually transformative entanglement with people...

This commentary explores how the material-nonmaterial transactions around reproduction among women raise paradoxical questions of reproductive autonomy and commercialization of reproduction. Drawing from medical anthropological studies on human reproduction, the technology around social egg freezing has been conceived to proffer ambivalent possibilities of hope, despair, and repair as mature women recalibrate their reproductive identities, especially in pronatalist contexts. Building on the material-discursive critique of the 'material turn', I ask if social egg freezing offers an empowering biological reprieve for women who have 'chosen' a non-normative (i...

Material gerontology poses the question of how aging processes are co-constituted in relation to different forms of (human and non-human) materiality. This paper makes a novel contribution by asking when aging processes are co-constituted and how these temporalities of aging are entangled with different forms of materiality. In this paper, we explore the entanglements of temporality and materiality in shaping later life by framing them as spacetimematters (Barad, 2013). By drawing on empirical examples from data from a qualitative case study in a long-term care (LTC) facility, we ask how the entanglement of materiality and temporality of a fall-detection sensor co-constitutes aging...

The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic had a profound impact on everyday life in Australia despite relatively low infection rates. Lockdown restrictions were among the harshest in the world, while older adults were portrayed as especially vulnerable by politicians and the media. This study examines the perceptions and experiences of the pandemic and lockdowns among 31 older Australians. We investigated how participants perceived their own vulnerability, their attitudes towards lockdowns and protective behaviors, and how the pandemic affected everyday life...

This article generates new understandings of dementia through feminist posthumanist and performative engagements with co-creative artmaking practices during a six-month study in a residential care home in Norway. Dementia emerges within multisensorial entanglements of more-than-human materials in three different artmaking sessions, which first materialized in the form of collective photographs and vignettes and culminated in a final exhibition, Gleaming Moments, in the care home. Drawing on these photographs, vignettes, and the author's engagement as a research artist in the sessions, this analysis examined how dementia was enacted as a spark of inspiration, felted warm seat pads, and a friendly more-than-human touch, that is, a touch of human and nonhuman art materials...

The practice of self-injury is considered deviant and pathological, and the stereotype of a self-injuring individual is a young, white, middle-class woman. By using an autoethnographic approach, I elucidate how four women and I, aged 35-51, with experiences of self-injury in adulthood, use, internalize, and speak through dominant discourses of self-injury. The practice of self-injury is an embodied one, and self-injury is stereotypically associated with immature, irresponsible, and emotionally unstable young women...

Under COVID-19 restrictions, older people were advised to avoid social contact and to self-isolate at home. The situation forced them to reconsider their everyday social spaces such as home and leisure time places. This study approached the meaning of social spaces for older people by examining how older people positioned themselves in relation to social spaces during the pandemic. The data were drawn from the Ageing and social well-being (SoWell) research project at Tampere University, Finland, and they consisted of phone interviews collected during the summer of 2020 with 31 older persons aged 64-96 years...

PURPOSE: The effects of arts engagement on older adults have been well-documented. However, the ways older adults overcome common situational and dispositional barriers to enhance personal growth and well-being are less known. METHODS: Fifty-six community dwelling older adults (71.3 ± 4.6 years) took part in dance, music, or a control workshop two times/week for ten weeks. Participants' personal growth was examined through focus groups and surveys in this mixed-methods study...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a terminal, neurodegenerative disease, and consequently is difficult to communicate about as it is stigmatized, and discussions are rife with misconceptions. By situating AD conversations in the sociocultural space of the opportunity model of presence during the end-of-life process, a framework developed illustrating the potential trajectory from living with illness through death and into bereavement, we examined networked discussions surrounding Alzheimer's related hashtags on Twitter (N = 132,803) between January 1st, 2010, and September 29th, 2021...

Memory is a major theme running through Kazuo Ishiguro's works, one of which is The Buried Giant. This study aims to analyze the concept of collective memory in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Buried Giant through hermeneutic interpretation and sociological analysis. The results show that this novel links collective memory with individual experience and generational identity whilst making aging a central element in the exploration of time and history. In the novel, collective memory is seen through the prism of aging...

Grandmothers are the major nonparental unpaid source of childcare in Western societies. Intensive caring for grandchildren may pose challenges to some grandmothers, but also offers an opportunity to refill the 'empty nest' often experienced in mid-life. When grandmothers' intensive involvement in their grandchildren's care decreases significantly or ceases altogether, they may experience a recurrence of the empty nest syndrome. This may be particularly powerful in the familial and pro-natalist Israeli society, where caring for children is a central tenet of femininity...

A deeper understanding of care demands the methodological finesse of qualitative research: we must observe, listen, and witness to expose what matters to care recipients. In this paper, we - a team of three: one early-career researcher and two supervisors - reflect on our experiences of designing and then seeking ethics approval for ethnographic research on care for older adults, many of whom demonstrate a lack of capacity to consent to research. Viewing experiences of well-being and dignity as embedded within interpersonal negotiations, this study privileges care home residents' daily life, looking to stories and observations of daily life to reveal the complexities of well-being in the care home setting...

In gerontological research, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning (LGBTQ+) older adults of color are a hard-to-reach and underrepresented population. In this paper, we reflected upon the process of designing and implementing a Participatory Action Research (PAR) study by and for LGBTQ+ older adults of color committed to intersectionality. Data generted from fieldnotes and focus groups with five older Black lesbians were analyzed to uncover epistemic tensions associated with building intersectional knowledge for social justice...

As the Boko Haram insurgency-induced conflict in Northeast Nigeria lingers and more people are made homeless, Displaced older persons who have lost their social networks, support systems, status, and roles as a result may experience new challenges at the internally displaced persons (IDPs) camps. Our study explored older adults' experiences of exclusion in the Lugbe IDP camp in Abuja. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with 14 displaced older adults aged 60 and above who have lived in the camp for five years...

The growing aging population has become a significant global issue in recent years, increasing the need for research that examines aging-related phenomena such as personal growth and development in later life. A major challenge in achieving this aim is the prevailing deficit perspective on aging, which is so pervasive that it often overshadows older adults' contributions to society and diminishes the opportunities encountered in older adulthood. Although perspectives on the nature of aging are gradually changing in a positive way, and the developments in medicine are improving health-related aspects of aging, it is still a worldwide challenge to eradicate negative stereotypes around aging...

In this study, older characters that appeared in all the episodes of the first seasons of eight most popular Turkish TV series on prime-time televisions in Turkey and those appeared in all the episodes of the first seasons of eight "original" Turkish series on Netflix were submitted to a comparative quantitative and qualitative content analysis. In this sense, the aim of this study was to reveal what kind of old age is promised to viewers by such media environments as TV and Netflix. Findings revealed that, when compared to the Turkish population, older people were significantly underrepresented in prime-time series and that, in other words, they were symbolically eliminated and exposed to age discrimination...