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Developing a trilayer analysis of global, national and individual perspectives, this book examines ageing and the health and social care crisis. It begins with an examination of how broad structural and discursive trends, such as neoliberalism and globalisation, have influenced the financing and provision of health and social care for older people in Western countries including Germany, Sweden and the UK. It then goes onto discuss the impact that privatisation, ‘choice’ and competition has had on service provision, including how declining social protections have impacted upon employment practices. Three UK case studies (active ageing, pre-emergency, and end of life care) provide insight into individual’s (both older people and health care workers) experiences of navigating the risky, fragmented and complex health and social care system. Then the UK’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is compared with Sweden and Germany’s, and the UK government’s intended solutions to the health and social care crisis is discussed. Finally, the book ends by showcasing examples of innovative care solutions that have been trialled in the UK, and what broader cultural and political changes are necessary to provide a more sustainable and dignified health and social care system for older people.

This multi-disciplinary volume brings together international scholarship from across cultural studies, humanities and social sciences. It involves critical review of a comparatively neglected issue – the desexualization of older people – that itself forms part of an emerging field of knowledge that relates to older people’s sexuality and intimacy. Funnelling down from more general to more particular experiences (often related to identity difference), the volume explores the various ways that older people encounter constraints on their sexual and intimate self-expression. Indeed, risk and surveillance can be seen as structuring conditions of ageing sexualities and the issues addressed concern difficulties in relation to consent, relating and relatives erotic aesthetics, gendered ageing sexuality (menopause), disabilities, dementia, care homes and their residents, sex and older lesbian, gay bisexual, trans and intersex people, and care services and ageing sexuality. As well as providing an overview of broader themes to which chapter point, the final chapter also outlines a research agenda that itself points towards creative forms of resexualization of diverse older selves. Although the volume’s focus is on desexualization, resexualization is to some extent acknowledged in each chapter.

The book explores how older people experience physical or sensory disability, taking a critical approach to gerontology. It also draws on critical disability studies, aspects of medical sociology and lifecourse studies. The book is informed by an empirical study with two groups rarely considered together in empirical or theoretical work – people first experiencing disability with ageing and people ageing with long-standing disability. Despite the fact that older people experiencing impairment are rarely considered ‘disabled’, the book shows that study participants could feel disabled by a range of factors including inaccessible environments and disablist interactions with others, as is the experience of disabled people generally. Often experienced in combination with losses of intimates, this can represent a challenge to a sense of value and meaning in life. Older people can also respond dynamically, engaging in challenging processes of interpretation and reinterpretation that are underappreciated in dominant understandings of later life lived with disability as a residual category encompassed in concepts such as ‘fourth age’. The book argues that the extent to which constructions of ageing and of disability, and the social devaluation of each, are intertwined and linked to fears of human vulnerability means that these issues would benefit from approaches that address them across the life span. It points to areas of scholarship offering potential for conversations across the fields of ageing and disability, arguing for an engagement with disability in older age as a personal, embodied, social, cultural, political and socio-economic phenomenon.

Despite increased awareness of sexual diversity, older people's accounts of sex and intimacy remain marginalised. This edited volume addresses diversity in sexual and intimate experience in later life (50+) and captures international research and analysis relating to intersectional identities. Contributors explore how being older intersects with differences of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class. Offering a critical focus and original contribution to an emerging, although still relatively neglected field, this essential collection extends knowledge concerning intimacies, practices and pleasures for those thought to represent normative, non-normative and 'new normative' forms of sexual identification and expression.

How well do the places where we live support the wellbeing of older adults? The Canadian population is growing older and is reshaping the nation's economic, social and cultural future. However, the built and social environments of many communities, neighbourhoods and cities have not been designed to help Canadians age well. Bringing together academic research, practitioner reflections and personal narratives from older adults across Canada, this cutting-edge text provides a rare spotlight on the local implications of aging in Canadian cities and communities. It explores employment, housing, transportation, cultural safety, health, planning and more, to provide a wide-ranging and comprehensive discussion of how to build supportive communities for Canadians of all ages.

This book is concerned with the social differences, divisions and diversity of later life. We argue that later life is no longer the marginalised category it once was. Instead, it is characterised by growing differences and divisions, including the divisions associated with class, gender, ethnicity and disability (infirmity). Many of these divides in later life echo and reflect similar divisions in working life. However, age and retirement create a new set of conditions that modifies both the nature and the consequences of these divisions. Each division, we suggest, is contingent upon both past and present influences. They are, in consequence, less sharply drawn and less clearly organised than similar divisions observed earlier in working life. Exploring these divisions and their various articulations in later life both illuminates the nature of the divisions themselves at the same time as highlighting the changing social locations that now constitute later life.

Focusing on mental health rather than mental illness, this book adopts a life course approach to understanding mental health and wellbeing in later life. Drawing together material from the fields of sociology, psychology, critical social gerontology, the mental health field, and life course studies, it analyses the meaning and determinants of mental health amongst older populations and offers a critical review of existing discourse. The book explores the intersecting influences of lifecourse experiences, social and structural inequalities, socio-political context, history, gender and age-related factors and demands an approach to prevention and resolution that appreciates the embedded, complex and multi-faceted nature of threats to mental health and ways to protect it. It foregrounds engagement with the perspectives and lived experiences of older people, including people living with dementia, and makes the case for a paradigmatic shift in conceptualising, exploring and researching mental health issues and supporting older people with mental health problems. The book is essential reading for policy makers, health and social care professionals and students, third sector agencies, researchers and all of those concerned to more effectively and collaboratively address mental health issues in later life.

This book examines some of the challenges facing older people, given a context of rising life expectancy, cuts to the welfare state, and widening economic and social inequalities. It explores precarity and ageing from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, critical perspectives, and contexts. Although cultural representations and policy discourses depict older people as a group healthier and more prosperous than ever, many older people experience ageing amid insecurities that emerge in later life or are carried forward as a consequence of earlier disadvantage. The collection of chapters develops a distinctive approach to understanding the changing cultural, economic and social circumstances that create precarity for different groups of older people. The aim of the book is to explore what insights the concept of precarity might bring to an understanding of ageing across the life course, especially in the context of the radical socio-political changes affecting the lives of older people. In doing so, it draws attention both to altered forms of ageing, but also to changing social and cultural contexts, and realities that challenge the assumption that older people will be protected by existing social programmes or whatever resources that can be marshalled privately.

This book’s starting point is the notion of theorising and the fact that, because scholarship at the intersection of ethnicity, race and old age has stagnated, we are in dire need of inquiries that focus on the context of discovery. The author argues that our scholarly imagination about this intersection needs to be developed now that the globalisation of international migration and transnationalism have increased the ethno-cultural diversity of our ageing populations. Through a scoping review of the last twenty years of research and theunderstandings of ethnicity and race that informs it, the author shows that scholarship on ageing and old age do not resonate well with the latest advancements in ethnicity and race scholarship. The book introduces gerontologists to social scientific discussions about ethnicity and race, introduces international migration scholars to the implications that population ageing has for the life-course, gives both of these scholarly fields insight into what characterizes scholarship at the intersection of ethnicity/ race and old age, andproposes a new research agenda. By bringing attention to the topics that have received the most attention (i.e. health inequalities, health and social care, intergenerational relationships and caregiving), and the manner in which ethnicity/ race have been made sense of so far, the author identifies the obstacles that scholarship on ethnicity, race and old age faces, and proposes how we can address them in an ethnicity-astute and diversity-informed manner.

This is the second volume arising from the ground-breaking New Dynamics of Ageing Research Programme. While the Programme produced many scientific papers and several project-based books this (and its companion volume) is the only place where most of the projects are represented in specially commissioned chapters. Each of these reports the key findings from each research project and places them in a wider context. Each chapter also contains a summary of key findings. Like its predecessor this book covers a wide range of state-of-the-art research on ageing, with a specific focus on autonomy and independence, the biology of ageing, nutrition in later life and representations of ageing.