Older adults want to exercise a sense of control over their relationships, structures and surroundings as they navigate the later life course. Through detailed ethnographic case studies, this book examines the dynamic lifeworlds of a hundred and seven community-dwelling older adults in Europe before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores the importance of agency, the frictions between self-perceptions of age and outside impositions and the need to deconstruct old age as a homogenising category. These insights challenge simple narratives of older persons as social burdens by highlighting the complex roles they fill in family, neighbourhood and communities.
Recenzijas
This a delightful kaleidoscope of countless aspects of growing old ... it is a unique book in the sense that it presents a rich collection of vignettes of elderly people across Europe. It is something that I have not come across before in anthropology. Sjaak van der Geest, University of Amsterdam
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Jay Sokolovsky
Introduction: Ageing in a Time of Crisis
Chapter
1. Social Worlds: Living, Learning and Liaising
Chapter
2. Moving through the World
Chapter
3. Working Worlds
Chapter
4. Financial Worlds: Spending and Affording
Chapter
5. Informal Care Worlds: Providing Care
Chapter
6. Formal Care Worlds: Receiving Care
Chapter
7. Legacies and Future Worlds
Conclusion: Age, Agency and a Summary
Epilogue
Appendix: Participant Index
References
Index
Katja Seidel is a Senior Lecturer at the Unit for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Innsbruck and co-Director of the ethnocineca International Documentary Film Festival in Vienna. She has conducted fieldwork in Argentina, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Spain and Germany, and co-directed the Holocaust research project A Letter to the Stars in Vienna.
