Full Description
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.
Contents
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
