Aging In Place through Culture: Participation, Design and Everyday Practices In Later Life

Session focuses on aging as a socially and culturally produced process, with particular attention to how cultural participation and inclusive design shape experiences of later life. While aging in place is widely addressed in sociology and social policy, it is often framed primarily through housing, care, and health infrastructures. This session recentres aging itself as the analytical core, asking how later life is actively constituted through everyday cultural practices, participation, and material arrangements that enable or constrain social inclusion.
Building on cultural gerontology and sociologies of everyday life, aging is understood not as a fixed life stage but as a dynamic process produced through social relations, institutions, and embodied practices. In this regard, Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital is used to examine how inequalities structure access to cultural participation in later life. Rather than treating space as the primary analytic category, spatial and material arrangements are approached as conditions through which aging is enacted and negotiated in everyday life.
Drawing on co-design and participatory design approaches (Sanders & Stappers), design is understood as a sociological process through which aging is mediated, supported, or constrained. This includes age-friendly cultural institutions, public services, and digital infrastructures that shape opportunities for participation, autonomy, and inclusion in later life.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to: cultural participation and wellbeing in later life; creative aging; age-friendly cultural policies; participatory and co-design approaches; cultural accessibility and inclusion; intergenerational cultural initiatives; digital cultural participation; everyday cultural practices; social and relational production of aging in later life.