| Description | This presentation explores the historical characterization of older people as a problematical population with its roots in populationist and Malthusian discourses, pension and retirement policy, and the industrial organization of capitalist labor. It builds to a discussion of an 'apocalyptic' demographic crisis in the 1980s as reckless anti-welfare governments propagated the image of the aging population as a risk to social security economies and instigator of an intergenerational war over competitive resources. While critics pointed out the ageist biases of stunted dependency ratios, the pro-profit bases of rising medical costs, the capitalization of care-housing and neglected realities of intergenerational cooperation, social gerontologists intervened with ideas about age diversity and 'linked lives' to demythologize this victimizing scenario and its 'statistical panic' (Woodward), that became intensified during the COVID pandemic. However, this presentation considers moving beyond population itself and its demographic crisis models of reproduction, drawing on radical concepts of kin and kinship derived from feminist, Indigenous and posthumanist thinking to envision a more inclusive and relational approach to age-based change. With new ideas about mutual belonging, multi-generational care, responsible planning, planetary justice and aging in shared human, non-human and more-than-human spaces of life, can we imagine an alternative future? Stephen Katz is Professor Emeritus of sociology and Distinguished Research Award recipient at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada, where he is a founding member of Trent’s Centre for Aging and Society. Publications include books Disciplining Old Age (1996), Cultural Aging (2005) and Ageing in Everyday Life (ed., 2018), and numerous scholarly and media publications on critical gerontology, aging bodies, health technologies, loneliness, memory culture and cognitive impairment. Currently he is working on a book project, Mind, Body and Self in Later Life: Essays and Collaborations. |
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