Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

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Ageing in Place in a Mobile World: New Media and Older People’s Support Networks

RC11 Sociology of Aging (host committee)
RC31 Sociology of Migration

Language: English

We wish to consider mobilities and technologies as a new paradigm for reassessing approaches to healthy ageing. While notions of “ageing in place” and “community dwelling” represent important contributions to knowledge, the concepts of “place” and “community” in such studies tend to assume strong – even exclusive – ties to proximate family, friends and local communities.
We welcome papers that consider how the recent proliferation of a wide range of affordable communication technologies is central to important transformations in our social and intimate lives, with a particular focus on what these new media mean for ageing and the importance of “ageing in place”.
Questions to consider include:

• How is the emerging polymedia environment transforming the ways in which the elderly experience ageing in place?
• In what ways is the social (and even intimate) life of the elderly no longer conducted wholly “in place”, within neat physical and territorial boundaries?
• How can ideas about “ageing in place” be conceived of as incorporating distant ties and connections?
• How are mobile lives lived by elderly bodies that are located in particular places?
• In what ways can new media be used to support those who are “ageing in place”, including by supporting their social networks and interactions with family and friends who are mobile or living at a distance?

Posters: