Aging in a Changing Climate: Sensory Experiences of Older Adults

Climate change, much like aging, is an inevitable reality that affects us all. Both processes require reflection on how old age unfolds in the context of a changing climate.

My presentation will explore how shifting weather patterns impact the everyday lives of older adults, highlighting how climate change is experienced at a sensory level in fleeting and often difficult-to-verbalize "here-and-now" moments of daily life. Weather fluctuations, such as heatwaves, represent a material dimension of this change, directly felt through the senses.

For decades, sociology and anthropology have sought to describe social life beyond Cartesian dualisms like nature and human, body and mind, or cognition and sensation. Drawing on Paul Vannini and Tim Ingold theories, I will show how integrating attention to weather as a practice and being-in-the-weather as a social phenomenon can reshape research. My presentation will emphasize the inseparability of the material and the sensual, offering new ways to understand the experience of living in a changing climate.

I will present findings from a two-year ethnographic field study on the sensory experience of climate change among individuals over 65 in Warsaw. Using creative methodologies like sensory walks and participatory photography, I transcended participants' verbal accounts to understand multi-sensory dimensions and layers of their experience.

I will reveal everyday weather moments where the interplay between aging and climate change subtly unfolds. By focusing on how older adults uniquely "sense" the weather—through heat, cold, and shifting air—my presentation will offer a fresh, sensory-driven perspective on the aging experience in an anthropocenic world.