End of life care for LGBT people

I’ve been at a seminar on End of Life Care for LGBT people today, mostly focusing on older people, although with briefer mention of younger people who are also coming to the end of their lives.

I’m no specialist in end of life issues, although I know a bit because of knowing about later life, which is when end of life issues come up for most people. I went along partly out of guilt because one of the organisers had asked me for help with recruiting older bi people to attend and I had tried but (as far as I know) failed.

(cc 19melissa68)

We started by going round the table, saying what our particular interests were in later life and why we were there. At the beginning of that process someone said ‘same sex partners’ as if that was a common experience to all of us and I prepared to start banging the bi and trans drum of ‘same sex partners does not cover us all, all of the time’. But then someone said how important it was to include trans issues in our discussions and gave some examples of how and why. And then someone else said that they particularly wanted to include bi issues because they are bi. And then someone else mentioned bi stuff again, and someone else trans and, really, by the time it came round to me, I felt almost redundant. Which was very nice indeed, and very encouraging. We also had some good discussion of particular issues for LGBT people of colour and people who have been living with HIV for decades.

Someone other than me was talking about the importance of separating out data from bi people from data from lesbians and gay men, which was very encouraging in terms of the likely reception of BiUK (and friends)’s forthcoming The Bisexuality Report (watch this space) which is going to argue just that.

I was delighted to hear that Age of Diversity, which is the successor organisation to Polari, are going to launch their website next month (it’s still in construction at the moment, but you can find it by googling).

There was quite a lot of discussion of the issue of people using a different name than their official name and the difficulties and distress this creates when someone is not fully compos mentis, or when their friends ring the hospital to ask after them but don’t know their legal name. I don’t know whether using a name other than your legal one is particularly common in the LGB community (I know it is in the trans community). I can imagine that it might be, but to me it feels an entirely standard issue in later life because, I now realise, 3 out of my 4 grandparents/pseudo-grandparents went by a middle name, so it’s an old chestnut to me (but none the less important).

People also talked about the importance of debunking the notion and scrapping the phrase ‘next-of-kin’. It has no legal meaning when someone is alive, only once they are dead, and it’s one of the main routes by which LGBT people do not get to have their nearest and dearest involved in their care. Lots of (sadly familiar to me) stories of estranged family turning up and making decisions for someone they had not seen for twenty years, while their partner or close friend is shut out.

I loved a passing comment made by a hospice chaplain when introducing himself and his organisation ‘we’re lovely. In fact, like most hospice people, you could say we’re terminally nice’.

One of the outcomes of the meeting was that the organisers are going to collect together useful resources on this topic. I’ll post the link for that once I know it. But for now, a few resources that I managed to jot down:

• REGARD (organisation for LGBT disabled people) and their campaign for ‘Sue’s Law’ (if you just search for ‘Regard and Sue’s Law you should find it)
• Kathy Allmack published a lit review on End of Life Care for LGBT people about three years ago
• NHS (don’t know which bit) has apparently just produced a guide on bereavement for (re?) trans people.
• Report on palliative care for LGBT people: National Council for Palliative Care (2011) Open to all?, NCPC and Consortium of LGBT voluntary and community organisations, London ISBN 978-1-898915-89-8
• Opening Doors Camden (part of Age UK) is launching a checklist for care homes and care providers on practical ways to be LGBT friendly. Out next week, should be available as a pdf on their website.

Theorising Age in Maastricht: Part 3

Back to note form, sorry.

Symposium on critical approaches to dementia, ageing and identity

Wendy Richards
Sleep and dementia [not their titles, throughout, I’m summarising]

A really interesting paper on the different meanings of sleep to carers of people with dementia, people with dementia and their families, written up already in Sociologlical Research Online. [get a copy]

(cc brianisinyou)

Julia Twigg
Clothing and dementia

Clothing associated fashion and frivolity, not world of dementia. Identity and display, which needs active subjectivity. Dementia erodes that. Evidence that people with dementia do often lose interest in clothes. But new views of dementia after Kitwood emphasise supporting subjectivity even through dementia.

Kontos embodied selfhood. String of pearls over the bib story.

Clothes affect how we move and sit. Helps remind people who they are. Care homes favour comfort and ease. But a man who has always worn shirt and tie may not feel comfortable in casualwear. Comfort is also about social comfort, being at ease with your social presentation.

Clothes as closest-in environment, especially with the closing in of the world with extreme frailty. Clothes can help promote benign interactions w PWD, continuity of person.

Clothing often very important to relatives too. ‘She would never have worn that’. One of the few presents you can give someone with dementia [as in the film Mimi show in the opening to the conference]

Foucault standardised bodies. Concern for clothes for PWD can be malign. Lee-Trewick ‘lounge standard’ residents, specific kind of femininity.

Imputed wishes but what if the person has changed therir mind? What about comfort and ease? Is there truth in the body when there is no truth  if the mind?

Richard Ward, Hair and Dementia

Hair and Care project

 

Ordinary hair care is headwork only. Body literally cloaked off. But in haircare for people with dementia, the body keeps intruding

Cover of easily Kitwood book ‘person to person’ shows someone transformed by grooming (before and after picture). Grooming as way off maintaining worth. If identity is performative, how do the identities of people with dementia get performed?

NICE dementia guidelines make no mention of grooming and presentation

Hannah Zellig
Poetry and dementia

Ordinary language of dementia is poetic: Forests of neurons, tangles of plaques. Poetry as way of apprehending dementia which is so baffling and awful.

‘Who is that can tell me who I am?’ King Lear

Poems about dementia:

• The Solitary by Vuyelwa Carlin (2008) – Ellen and Lydia [I think more, not sure whether whole book is poems about dementia, might be]
• ‘Incredible shrinking brain’ diminishing poem by Laws each version more words cut out, like dementia
• ‘Somewhat unravelled’ by Jo Shapcott (2010) from Of Mutability

Precise language of poetry  and the loss of language in dementia is a fantastic paradox.

(Sheila Peace) Blank verse perhaps a particularly appropriate form because of blankness of dementia

(Hannah) Yes. There’s also some other poetry with very tight rhymes, brings you up against an endstop abruptly
Also ike the experience of dementia.

Is there poetry written by poets who developed dementia? Don’t know, would be very interesting if so.

More Theorising Age in Maastricht

Largely cross posted from the CABS blog, so in more complete sentences (but without the annoying extra white space of that. I don’t get along with Blogger half as well as I do with WordPress)

I went to an extremely interesting panel called ‘Critique of Ageing Well’ which was mainly about critiquing what is variously known as active ageing, successful ageing, positive ageing, productive ageing and so on. There are, of course, nuances between these phrases, but the critique can be general as well as specific to particular approaches. This is something I’ve written about myself for K319, (in Learning Guide 2 – out this coming February!) but I wish I’d been able to attend this symposium first.

 

Just picking out bits from two of the abstracts gives you a nice, if very dense, summary:

 

[Debbie Laliberte Rudman, The University of Western Ontario, Canada]
… ‘positive aging’ discourses [can be] conceptualized as technologies of government. Such discourses enlist aging citizens in a duty to age well through shaping and idealizing possibilities for identity and activity. This […] raises concerns regarding ways ‘positive aging’ discourses create demands for ‘aging well’ which are differentially achievable and narrowly defined.

 

[Thibauld Moulaert, K.U. Leuven, Belgium]
…International discourses of AA have slowly moved from a general framework supporting many dimensions of ageing toward a concentration of the active side, thanks to the confusing notion of “activity”. Would it be possible that this trend consequently neglects some major aspects of ageing like its diversity and inequality? [yes!]

 

The final speaker, Silke van Dyk, University of Jena, Germany was the most challenging. It was difficult stuff and I was tired at the end of a long day (I’m going to ask her if she has a written copy of her paper) but what I took from it was a challenge not only to active ageing but also to where the critics of active-ageing often (probably inadvertently) end up.

Her argument was that active ageing is a paradigm of sameness – older people should be as much like middle-aged people as possible. But, in resisting this, critics of active ageing end up positioning older people as too different from younger people. They end up renaturalising old age as a homogenous category with its own characteristics distinct from those of younger people. Her answer was deconstructing chronological age and theorising midlife, via postcolonial and queer perspectives, which I think are good projects (although not as novel as she positioned them to be) but I’m struggling with quite how that would play out and how you could use that to challenge mandatory active ageing in practice contexts. I’d like to think more about this, though, as I do think she is on to something.

 

Phew! That was long and difficult, sorry. For some light relief (although also making serious points), and especially for Caroline Holland:

(cc Capital M)

I also went to a paper about cultural representations of the ageing of Lemmy from Motorhead. It was by Magnus Nilsson from Karlstad University, Sweden. I won’t try to cover everything he said, just pick out some bits I was particularly interested in. Lemmy (or rather, Lemmy in his fans’ imaginations) is the antithesis of healthy ageing. He’s still drinking and taking drugs and having as wild a life as ever. In the famous song Ace of Spades he has apparently changed a clause so he now sings ‘I don’t wanna live forever … but apparently I am’. His fans view him as indestructible, telling a joke that only two things will survive a nuclear holocaust, cockroaches and Lemmy. 

I was interested that some audience members were quite uncomfortable with this. One commented that it was very ageist of his fans not to let him age and another pointed out how dangerous a role model he provided to other people who wouldn’t be able to continue to abuse their health in these ways without major health problems or death. I can, of course, see their points of view entirely, but my own response was to enjoy the transgressive figure as a ripost to the pressures on people to age healthily. I mean, I wouldn’t want to do it myself, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone I knew (or even to Lemmy himself, if it is indeed true – this presentation made no claims to be about the real Lemmy, just about his cultural representation) but I think we benefit from a wider range of models of ways of being older, including Lemmy.

Conference notes: Theorizing Age in Maastricht

Here are the usual idiosyncratic notes from a conference I am currently attending. As ever, my additions and thoughts are in square brackets.

It’s Theorising Age: Challenging the Disciplines, which is the 7th International Symposium on Cultural Gerontology and also the inaugual conference of the European Network in Ageing Studies.

(cc d6v1d)

(I have walked over this bridge over the river Maas. It’s lovely. But the sky was a more ordinary grey.)

It’s one of the best conferences I’ve been to for ages. But I’m not going to end up blogging as much of it as usual as I’m having an exciting range of technical issues. But here’s some.

Opening Plenary: Kathleen Woodward Taking care: Population aging, globalization, assisted living 

Who cares for carers of older people? In the US home care workers don’t get minimum wage or overtime (the logic being that the state should not be intruding into people’s homes)

Famous case of a care worker, Evelyn Coke, who sued for overtime, the case went to Supreme Court. Lost. Died.

Highly racialised, with Black women caring for White older people [I think less so in the UK and also Phillippino, Polish? But still racialised, and increasingly so?] Global flows of care givers, transnational, globalisation.

book recommendation: Evelyn Nakano Glenn Forced to care: Coercion and caregiving in America

 New frontier of worklife balance is not child care but elder care [academic feminists finally becoming interested in old age as it starts to affect them] 

Film Paper Dolls (2006) Tomer Heymann,

(cc golauglau)

Documentary about Phillippino MtF transsexuals, working in an ultra orthodox community in Israel as carers to old people. In the evenings, performing a drag act together called ‘The Paper Dolls’.

 Asked what he thinks about having a transsexual care worker, one man said “I got used to it, that’s life”. He had asked for a male caregiver but by the end of the film he gives her a skirt and matching gloves. 

Are ‘men who are women’ forced to care? Their trans-ness is not incidental to their finding employment as carers. Looking after older people is important part of Phillippino culture, they say, [does this extend to men looking after OP in the Phillippines or is it something that is culturally important but done by women?]

 Both carer and cared for are acutely vulnerable in this set up.

Historical context. Since second intifada, no more Palestinian migrant workers. Came from other parts of world. Visas instantly revoked if fired, sent home. 3 Paper Dolls left Israel for the UK where is at least a path to citizenship

In the UK the drag act become ‘The Paper Dolls fromIsrael’ transnational identity included into their performance.

Frail Italian elders, migrant workers [paper in recent-ish edition of Sociology about this] – previously odd couples in public spaces like parks, becoming unremarkable.

Quotable ageing

Need a way to get going writing on a topic? Why not start with a quote.

Null points for originality but full marks for doability in very little time, thanks to the wonders of the internet (I particularly rate The Quote Garden). Also, sometimes the old ones are the best (I meant writing techniques but this is itself a quote about my topic). So this afternoon I’m looking for quotes about ageing.

There are an awful lot out there. Here are some of my favourites, not properly attributed unless the website did so for me:

• Old age is no place for sissies – Bette Davis
• Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional – Chili Davis
• In youth the days are short and the years are long; in old age the years are short and the days long.  ~Nikita Ivanovich Panin
• Age does not diminish the extreme disappointment of having a scoop of ice cream fall from the cone.  ~Jim Fiebig

(cc) Spookygonk

• There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.  ~John Mortimer
• Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.  ~Maurice Chevalier, New York Times, 9 October 1960
• The first sign of maturity is the discovery that the volume knob also turns to the left.  ~Jerry M. Wright
• There is always a lot to be thankful for, if you take the time to look. For example, I’m sitting here thinking how nice it is that wrinkles don’t hurt.  ~ Anon
• Grow old with me!  The best is yet to be.  ~Robert Browning
• I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities.  It is the only pleasure I have left.  ~Voltaire
• An archeologist is the best husband any woman can have:  the older she gets, the more interested he is in her.  ~Agatha Christie, news summaries, 9 March 1954
• Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.  ~Quoted by Francis Bacon, Apothegm

(cc) osmium

• First you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to pull your zipper up, then you forget to pull your zipper down.  ~Leo Rosenberg
• The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest.  You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.  ~T.S. Eliot, quoted in Time, 23 October 1950
• Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.  ~Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein), Diary in Exile, 1935
• Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.  ~Henry Ford

And of course, my particular favourite, after which this blog is named:

There is a wicked inclination in most people to suppose an old man decayed in his intellects. If a young or middle-aged man, when leaving a company, does not remember where he laid his hat, it is nothing; but if the same inattention is discovered in an old man, people will shrug up their shoulders, and say, “His memory is going.”

Boswell, J (1791) Life of Johnson Vol IV, p.501

When I say they’re my favourites, I don’t mean I necessarily agree with them. In fact, I’d be rather muddle-headed if I did since several of them contradict each other. Rather, I mean that they strike me as pithy and well worded and revealing of everyday societal sense-making about ageing and old age.

Fiction and the cultural mediation of ageing: Final part (I promise)

Later, I gave a paper in a panel on narrativity and non-normativity and only seem to have made notes on one of the other papers:

The successful failure of narrative in Lisa Genova’s Still Alice

Sarah Falcus

Novel about psycho-linguistics prof who gets early onset dementia [want to read this one too]

(cc) quimby

‘Everything she was was about words’, one of first words she can’t remember is ‘lexicon’. Metafictional concerns in the novel. 3^rd person narra but privileges PWD’s point of view. This conflicts somewhat with coherence and chronology demanded by novel form. (not experimental text, fairly trad)

Reader too experience something of Alice’s experience but not to get lost in it, as Alice is lost. Her missing words are also absent from the text, at the beginningn of novel. People’s names too ‘that man’ as she can’t remember her hus. Repeated sentences and paras. Don’t know some things because she doesn’t.

Alice is only 49 at onset – resists association of dementia with ageing. Activities of Daily Living questionnaire – is incontinence because of dementia or because of ageing? But pre diagnosis, attributes her anxiety, confusion, memory loss to menopause = natural v. monster of dementia

Nearly all fiction about ageing contains a ‘mirror-moment’ (Kathleen Woodward)

[Notes definitely getting more sparce as I got more tired]

Naomi Richards from the Look at Me project

Putting older women in the picture

Phototherapy. Working with Rosie Martin, who worked with Jo Spence in 1980s to create phototherapy! As before, using photography to heal, beyond the family album, dressing up.

Aged 47-60 women. 5 full days over 4 week period. Photo diaries to familiarize with camera, over one week. And to help them think visually. Not as a prompt to talk, they were as interested in the product as the process, unlike traditional creative methodolgies in social science which tend to focus on the process [and particularly the talk about the process] [very interesting. Think some more about the implications of this]. Re-enactment session on theme ‘transformation’ transformative visual narrative using props.

One participant’s theme was Gaga to Lady Gaga.

Photos within her grasp rather than the spectre over her shoulder [kind of literal/metaphorical thinking I’m not good at but really like. Seeing something that is literally true as well as metaphorically].

Marta Miquel-Baldellou, Univ of Lleida

From pathology to invisibility: the discourse of ageing in vampire ficture

Vampires don’t show their age and don’t age. Vampires first in fiction looked old. No longer. Repulsive, now generally attractive. Bram Stoker, foreign, aristocratic and old. Anne Rice Interview with the Vampire started trend of young vampires, and introduced vampire children. Also first to be sympathetic

Aged vampires in Vict fiction as sign of difference.As became younger, became more sympathetic, true hero of the novel. Appears in mirrors in modern novels [not in the novels I’ve read]

Fiction and the cultural mediation of ageing: Part 2

Barbara Czarniawska, Univ of Gothenburg

Narrative medicine: or why doctors do not like to listen to the stories of older patients.

Narr medicine, not just about patient narratives of illness/experience, also about patients writing as part of their therapy, medics stories about patients and about themselves.

Arthur Frank ‘illness is an occasion for autobiog’ – more time, more need. [Is illness particularly an occasion for autobiography? Depends on the sort of illness. Flu is not an occasion for autobiography. Was Frank referring to chronic illness? I ought to read Frank again]

Robertson Davies 1994, The Cunning Man, another recommended book.

RD Summarizing the WHO definition of ‘health’ as ‘health is when nothing hurts very much’ [This is not the WHO definition but I quite like it as an aphorism – it’s quite realistic, workable and everyday, rather than the unachievableness of the WHO definition. And it makes it clear that disability is not ill-health. Although what about disabilities which involve chronic pain? Would someone describe themselves as healthy but in pain? Seems possible that they might. And it also falls down a bit because you may not be in pain with a blood clot that will kill you, but you’re not healthy (are you?)]

Audience comment after: this definition is also good in relation to ageing – more realistic that positive ageing agenda – ‘if your body is as much like a young person’s as possible’ [that’s my phrase/critique]

(cc) nursing pins

Was the cunning man:

–       a doctor from the past, before evidence-based medicine and standardization?

–       or from the future with the growth of holistic and alternative medicine?

–       just a patient’s dream, never existed?

Annemarie Mol (2008) The logic of care. Philosopher contrasting logic of choice (customer/citizen) v logic of care (patient, albeit active).

Audience comment: both are available to medics in care settings, they chose which one they draw on according to discursive purposes [does it make a diff if you call it a logic, rather than a discourse? I think it does. Discourse emphasizes variability, logic suggests discrete system. Interpretative repertoire, of course, is supposed to indicate even higher degree of variability]

Not everybody wants to tell stories about their experience. Shouldn’t become a new imperative (no danger of that in medicine. Might be in management)

Nurses’ handover abolished in some hosps – loss of a storytelling opportunity for nurses.

Then I chaired a panel on Fictional stategies and metaphors

Joan Walker, Loughborough

Love and relationships over 65, do comtemporary  british novels reflect the new reality?

Non-fiction since 1972 de Beauvoir Coming of Age, has known that older women have sex and relationships. Gerontology textbooks routinely acknowledge this now. But contemporary novels don’t seem to know this.

Alison Lurie ‘Foreign Affairs’ 1984 novel

Covers of novels about 65+ women’s relationships don’t show the women, have abstract design, objects, cartoons, younger woman shown.

Elena Bendien, Utrecht

A metaphor for ageing: shrinking

Dutch writer, not trans eng Inez van Dullemen ‘past is dead’ Vroeger is dood’, older woman (born 1920s?) still writing.

Metaphor of ‘shrinking’ is a key one in writing about ageing, also in policy – shrinking resources/social contact/shrinking workforce.

Is a spatial metaphor – reduction, contraction, drying out, loss of moisture and volume. Etmology [in Dutch? Or also in English?] shrinking like a snail going back into its shell – snail isn’t reduced by shrinking, just going home!

(cc) daveograve

OP’s bodies often described as shriveled, shrunken. Contracting is not about loss, it’s about making more dense. Signif for thinking about ageing.

Zoe Brennan, UWE

Fictional strategies for representing the older woman as fully human: reclaiming the everyday.

(in novels)

Make the older woman the central character

Then:

1)    inspirational, extraordinary female characters. Smash preconceptions about what older women are like e.g. Happy Ever After Jennie Diskie, has rela with much younger man, but then leaves him to go off and travel round the world. Rhode Island Blues, Fay Weldon, much quoted this conf. Challenge the idea that character is set by the time you are old. Show people developing and changing. Complex

2)    Re-evalutes the day-to-day: May Sarton Spinster, Barbara Pym – not remarkable charcters. Don’t do remarkable things, live everyday lives as you might expect for older people – visit family, cook, have hobbies. Activities not dismissed as time-filling – absorbing. (hobby as dismissive term)

3)    Angry texts, texts that rage. Bodies that don’t work. Texts about embodiment. May Sarton As we are now Frustration, society makes it worse. Ist person narrator is a powerful way of doing this, as Carrie in As we are now – can see her decline through her own journal writing. [read this! Has been on my (metaphorical) ‘novels to read’ longlist for years – move it to shortlist!]

Pictures of ageing

I’m trying out an image-searching Activity I’m planning for K319. The students are going to do a tutorial from the OU library on searching for images on the internet and using them legally (creative commons and suchlike). I just need to find some search terms that are likely to work for them, so they can apply their new skills to a topic of relevance to the bit of the course they will be studying that week.

My first search of Flikr, limited to creative commons licensed images, used the search term ‘ageing’. This is not going to work as most of the pictures that come up are nothing to do with ageing (or not that I can see, anyway). But there were one or two lovely images which I am posting here in case I want to use them again:

(cc) magnificentfrigatebird

(cc) quentinsf

(cc) ectopiclight

(cc) ma neeks

(cc) The Nice Flavor

I think I’d better stop, I’m getting carried away. So many lovely, lovely images!

Actually, I think maybe this Activity will work, if I reconceptualise it  a bit. I was thinking of getting them to choose lots of images of something and make some generalisations about them. For that, a search term that gets lots of suitable hits would be a big help. But I think it would work just as well if I asked them to find just one image that they find compelling/interesting/informative about ageing, and then get them to articulate what it is about it that made them pick it. So I will try it myself based on these images.

Ah, I immediately discover that I’d choose different ones for different adjectives.

Most beautiful would be the faded rose one, but I probably wouldn’t choose that in a public forum (which this wouldn’t necessarily be for the students) because it seems cheesy and corny for a professional gerontologist, and a bit suspect and sleazy for a relatively-young person to talk about the beauty of ageing. But (pseudo-privately) I do think that’s what makes that picture beautiful. A picture of that rose a week prior would have been obvious and not very interesting (I have several like that in my own photo albums). The ageing of that rose, to my eye, makes it more beautiful.

Most compelling for me would be the woman playing the harmonica. I like the way her gaze looks simultaneously abstracted and focused – abstracted from the photographer and the viewer but focused on the playing. I like the emphasis on her arms and their skin markings and the bags under her eyes. I like it as an image of an older(ish) person that is outside the usual canons of frail vulnerable care-receiver or golden retirement consumer heaven (Bytheway, 2003; Williams et al., 2010)

I might need to do some more distinguishing between whether I want the students to chose powerful images (which is what I’m mostly choosing) or images that suggest something interesting to them about ageing (which might be the same, but might not). But that’s a minor tweak to work out later.

Hooray for blogging – it not only helps me remember things for later, but also gives me ideas for the present.

References:

Bytheway, Bill, (2003) ‘Visual representations of late life’. In Faircloth, C.A. (ed), Aging Bodies: Images and Everyday Experience, Altamira, Walnut Creek, California.

Williams, Angie, Wadleigh, Paul, Ylänne, Virpi, (2010) ‘Images of older people in UK magazine advertising: toward a typology’, International Journal of Aging & Human Development, Vol. 71 Issue 2, p83-114,

Slow liveblog on ‘positive ageing’: Part 2

The next installment of chronicling my getting-to-grips with the concepts of positive/active/successful ageing.

(cc) twicepix

I’ve just read this paper:

Minkler, M., & Holstein, M. B. (2008). From civil rights to … civic engagement? Concerns of two older critical gerontologists about a “new social movement” and what it portends. Journal of Aging Studies, 22(2), 196-204.

from which I have learned that the debate in the US is also about ‘civic engagement’ in later life. Part of Minkler and Holstein’s argument is that this theoretically broad idea of continuing political participation and active involvement in community life in practice gets reduced to formal volunteering in public or private organisations. They identify a number of problems with this, some of which are quite theoretical about the nature of subjectivity. Since I’m wanting to end up with something I can use to teach students, I’m going to focus on trying to render their more theoretical observations into something that I think will be more comprehensible to the sort of students I think are going to study this course:

• that it has the effect of equating older people’s value with their continuing productivity. If you’re not producing something of public value, through volunteering, you’re not seen as ageing well.
• that it privileges the public sphere over the private. Many older women have substantial childcare responsibilities for their grandchildren which preclude volunteering, but this isn’t seen as civic engagement.
• that it doesn’t allow for acts of self-nurture, which people also need.
• volunteering is much more possible for the fit and healthy than for those with health problems. Emphasising the importance of volunteering further suggests that the oldest old (the ‘fourth agers’) are not legitimate/significant/ageing well.
• It doesn’t recognise economic differences. You can’t afford to volunteer in later life if you are still working in low paid jobs. (And I’d add, with my ex-volunteer-co-ordinator hat on, volunteering can cost you money, even within a well-managed scheme which pays expenses. Not large amounts of money but amounts that you notice if you are living on a very limited budget).
• the emphasis on volunteering doesn’t tend to count political activism or other more contested, less apple-pie, forms of public engagement. It’s all about mitigating the status quo, rather than transforming it
• it’s all just a way of getting older people to do for free the work that governments and other organisations ought to be doing and paying people to do (there’s an obvious link here to critiques of the Big Society idea here in the UK).

That feels like incremental additions to my previous understandings, but useful ones. I don’t think this is the droid article I’m looking for for the students, as it seems the debate is too different in the US.

Liveblogging a potential research/teaching synergy

One of the things academics are always encouraged to do is to achieve synergies between our research and our teaching activities.

(cc) Ankher

In my experience, it’s relatively straightforward to put your research into your teaching materials, as long as you are lucky enough to be working on a course that has some relevance to your research (not always the case). It’s great when that is possible, because you (hopefully) end up with teaching materials that are both cutting-edge and deeply theorised.

Sometimes your reseach and your teaching get so beautifully synchronised that you can’t tell any more which is driving which, as happened for me last year with imagining futures.

But I also really like it when my teaching leads to research areas. That happened a little bit with the concept of ‘life courses’ last year, although it feels as if I haven’t got into that properly yet in research terms. And now I can see another possible one coming along.

I need to write a new section for K319 introducing and then critiquing the notion of ‘Positive’ or ‘Active’ or ‘Successful’ ageing. This is a literature about which I know a bit but am no expert. My intial literature review found nothing suitable for students because the topic seems to get so quickly into (relatively) deep theory. One of my colleagues suggested I should write something more accessible myself. It does seem like the sort of thing I might write, since I’m interested in the topic and various people have told me that putting theory into relatively accessible terms is one of my Special Skills. It’s too late to do that for the K319 Reader, but that might be something I do in the future. Or I might not.

But either way, I need to gen up on the topic for K319 and I’m bearing in mind that it might turn into a more research kind of output too. So I thought I would do a sort of slow liveblog of how I get on with that project, even if it turns out to go nowhere in research terms.

Here’s pretty much my current summary of the debate, as sent to a producer who is creating me some film and audio clips to help introduce and personify the topic:

‘Successful/positive/active ageing’ means encouraging older people to remain physically and socially active, aiming to get away from the notion of older people as passive and needy. The critique is basically that that’s all very well, but it’s not possible for all older people, especially the oldest old, those on modest incomes and those without good health. There should be ways of being old that are not about being as much like a younger person as possible.”

I will post  more when I have a better understanding of the topic than that.