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 rang ... More

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.