1st Edition
Shaping Ageing Social Transformations and Enduring Meanings
This volume examines the manifold, often contradictory, aspects of ageing, considering the ways in which contemporary social transformations affect the experience, conception, interpretation, and representation of ageing. Thematically arranged, it brings together the latest scholarly work from around the world to consider theories and narratives of ageing and the effects of space and place on identity and the experience of old age. Combining micro and macro perspectives, as well as theoretical and applied research, this interdisciplinary volume offers cross-cultural and comparative studies that resist overgeneralization and reductivism in an effort to shed fresh light on our experience, understanding, and response to ageing in the modern world. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, particularly sociology, gerontology, demography, social policy, and cultural studies, with interests in ageing and later life.
Introduction: Ageing Matters: A Constructivist Perspective
Adriana Teodorescu and Dan Chiribucă
Part 1: Theories and Narratives of Ageing and Old Age
1. The Philosophic Homework of Later Life: On Narrative, Wisdom, and the Positive Potential of Growing Old
William L. Randall
2. Gerontophobia: The Cultural Roots of the Old-Age Anxiety in Contemporary Society
Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Adriana Teodorescu
3. Cougars and Crones: Maverick Archetypes for Older Women
Amanda Barusch
4. Visual Representations of Older Persons: Current Discourses and their Historical Roots
Eugène Loos and Jo Thijssen
5. ‘Positive Ageing Happens in The West’: Ageing Perceptions and Active Ageing Policy Implementation Among Romanian General Practitioners
Irina Catrinel Crăciun
Part 2: Ageing and Old Age in Different Spaces
6. ‘It’s Okay to Color Outside the Lines’: Living, Ageing and Dying in a Hospice ‘Home’
E. Moore Quinn
7. Ageing Behind Locked Doors: Growing Older in Secure Mental Health Care and Prison Settings
Renske Claasje Visser
8. Providing Elderly Care in Precarious Settings: A Case Study in Lima, Peru
Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori
9. Risks and Promises of Being Old in Social Media
Adriana Teodorescu and Dan Chiribucă
10. Beauty in Later Life: Voices from Older Korean Women in New Zealand
Saemyi Chung
Biography
Adriana Teodorescu is Associate Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania, and the co-editor of Death in Contemporary Popular Culture.
Dan Chiribucă is Professor of Sociology at Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania.
