The Politics of Ageing: Later-Life Activism and Political Agency In Grassroots Movements

Social movement scholarship has long examined how people enter, sustain, and exit collective action. Yet its dominant analytical vocabulary often privileges youth, visibility, novelty, and moments of rupture. As a result, later-life activism tends to appear as an exception, a residue of earlier political commitments, or a form of civic engagement detached from contentious politics.

This panel asks what becomes visible when ageing is treated not as a background variable, but as a constitutive dimension of political agency in grassroots movements. Rather than asking whether older people remain politically active despite ageing, it asks how ageing transforms the forms, meanings, capacities, and limits of activism itself and how activism (re)shapes ageing experiences. How do older activists transmit, revise, or contest movement memories? How do movements accommodate or exclude ageing bodies? How do later-life biographies reshape repertoires of protest, risk, solidarity, and care?

We invite empirical, theoretical, and methodological papers on growing older in grassroots struggles across different world regions, including feminist, environmental, labour, anti-racist, anti-war, indigenous, housing, care, human rights, and democratic justice movements. The panel particularly welcomes contributions grounded in Global South, Global East, postcolonial, post-socialist, and indigenous contexts. Rather than treating these contexts as peripheral case studies, it approaches them as theory-generating sites from which to question the dominance of North American and Western European cases in scholarship on ageing and activism.