Health, Cognition and Later Life - Sociological Perspectives

Health in later life is too often treated as a biomedical fact rather than a socially constructed and relational category. This session invites papers that interrogate how health, frailty, and disability in old age are produced, measured, and experienced within specific social, cultural, and institutional contexts. We are particularly interested in work that challenges the assumed objectivity of health status — showing how self-rated health shifts with age-group comparison, cohort, and life stage, and how categories such as "frail," "disabled," or "dependent" operate as much as symbolic and administrative constructs as they do as clinical descriptions. Contributions engaging with embodiment, the conditional and unpredictable quality of advanced old age, and the gap between epidemiological prevalence estimates and lived experience of (in)capacity are especially welcome, as are papers addressing how ageism amplifies health inequalities and shortens life expectancy. We also seek comparative and Global South-inclusive perspectives that question Eurocentric models of "successful" or "healthy" ageing, and papers examining the systemic and policy dimensions of health in later life — including the health-social care interface, data integration, and digitalisation of services.

Possible topics: social construction and measurement of frailty/disability; self-rated health and peer-comparison effects across cohorts; embodiment and the fourth age; ageism's health and economic costs; health-social care integration and digitalisation; comparative/Global South perspectives on "healthy ageing."