Ageing Multiple: Navigating Relational and Social Lives of Ageing, Caring, and Dying

The interdisciplinary subject of ageing has long attracted sociological attention. Being interrelated to a range of social phenomenon, individual ageing processes are underpinned by multiple cultural meanings, organised by various social expectations, and structured under political ideologies. These layered situatedness increase the internal and relational complexities of the diverse social lives of ageing and related life events of illness, dying, caring, and endings, for both the ageing individual and others who care for them. In reality, this looks like the conflict between how dominant understanding of positive ageing fails to support the ageing individual’s transitions and losses into end-of-life underpinned by philosophies of dying well. Caring for ageing individuals often entails the double bind of meeting ethical/moral standards of ‘good (enough) care’ whilst navigating conflicting structural constraints and expectations.

In this open session, we seek to work towards an understanding of ageing multiple. That is, we invite cutting-edge sociological scholarship to couple ageing with processes of caring, dying, and endings to consider it to be fundamentally social, relational, and multiple. Topics might include but are not limited to:

• How epistemic/conceptual tensions emerge when ageing, caring, and dying intersect;
• How institutional and structural expectations and (gendered, classed, racial, and other) ideals about ageing, caring, dying, and loss are formed, sustained, and challenged;
• How emotion and affect play a role in understanding, experiencing, and supporting ageing, caring, and dying, and;
• How existing and emerging intersections of ageing, caring, and dying transform everyday lives, infrastructures, institutions, and (imagined/collective) futures.