{"title":"Climate transition and climate adaptation: The experiences of older immigrants from the former Soviet Union in Israel","authors":"Natalie Ulitsa, Liat Ayalon","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101304","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101304","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Although immigrant adjustment has been widely studied, the impact of climate and environmental changes on immigrants' experiences, particularly among older immigrants, has received less attention. Older immigrants are especially vulnerable due to challenges arising from the intersection of advanced age and immigrant status, challenges that are further compounded by global climate change. This study addresses this gap by exploring the retrospective experiences and current perceptions of older immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) in Israel, focusing on their climate transition and adaptation processes. Drawing on the life course perspective and intersectionality approach as key theoretical frameworks, the study examines how past experiences and intersecting social identities influence adaptation to new climatic conditions and natural environment.</div><div>We employed a qualitative methodology, utilizing semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 28 older Israeli immigrants from the FSU who arrived in Israel during the 1990s. Thematic content analysis revealed three key themes: 1) the experience of climate transition upon initial arrival in Israel and over time; 2) nostalgia for the climatic and environmental conditions of the FSU; and 3) strategies for acclimating and finding comfort in the new climatic and natural environment of Israel.</div><div>The findings highlight the diverse and complex nature of climate transition experiences among older immigrants, shaped by various psychosocial factors. These insights emphasize the need for tailored support to assist older immigrants in adapting to new climate conditions, which is crucial as global climate change continues to impact vulnerable populations.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"72 ","pages":"Article 101304"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143098672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"I care a lot: A political economic approach to aging","authors":"Elif Çevik , Orhan Çevik","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101303","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101303","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this scholarly investigation, the discourse revolves around the phenomenon of aging, a salient concern within the realm of social policy and social services, as elucidated through the portrayal of older individuals in the films <em>I Care a Lot</em>, <em>I, Daniel Blake</em>, <em>Lun Lok Yan</em>, and <em>Bizi Hatırla</em>. Employing a qualitative research approach, the study's research design was structured as a case study, with the thematic content analysis method being employed for data examination. The underpinning theoretical framework of this research hinged upon Carroll Estes' political economy model. This comprehensive model scrutinizes the overarching concept of aging on a macroscopic scale, delving into its ideological, state-related, gender-based, post-industrial capitalist, and globalized dimensions, while concurrently delving into the interwoven systems of subjugation at a micro level, which encompass class, race/ethnicity, gender, and citizenship. Primarily, the study delves into aging and its multifaceted dimensions, encompassing demographic, societal, and historical facets. Subsequently, it elucidates the challenges that manifest during the aging process and elucidates prominent social theories pertaining to older people. The political economy theory, coupled with Estes' model, is elaborated upon expansively. The concluding segment, centered on film analysis, subjects the selected film to a detailed examination, aligning with five research inquiries fashioned in consonance with the aforementioned theoretical framework. The findings thus gleaned evinced a congruence between the cinematic portrayal of aging experiences and the precepts of the political economy theory, thus lending support to Estes' perspectives.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"72 ","pages":"Article 101303"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143098720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editorial for the special issue the growing older of humans, nonhumans, and more-than-humans","authors":"Michela Cozza , Anna Wanka","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101305","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101305","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"72 ","pages":"Article 101305"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143349414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mobilities and leisure in later ages: The role of religious tourism in the lives of low-income older women in India","authors":"Prajwal Nagesh , Ajay Bailey , Sobin George , Lekha Subaiya","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101302","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101302","url":null,"abstract":"<div><h3>Background and objectives</h3><div>With the expansion of low-income urban areas in low and middle-income countries (LMIC), the recognition of leisure opportunities for older women remains under-researched. This study uses a mobility framework to explore access to leisure for older adults in a low-income neighbourhood in Bengaluru, India.</div></div><div><h3>Research design and methods</h3><div>This ethnographic study included participant observations, 33 in-depth interviews with older adults, and key informants, supplemented by archival research to explore leisure mobility. The paper specifically focuses on a religious tour through rural Tamil Nadu, India, which the primary researcher undertook with a group of older women from one of Bengaluru's oldest low-income neighbourhoods.</div></div><div><h3>Results</h3><div>We found that community mobilities, such as the annual religious tours, enabled older women to temporarily escape urban hardships and offered them a phase of agency to plan their travel and leisure. Everyday mobility opportunities for travel unrelated to work were often not age-friendly or accessible. The religious tour on the rented bus became a theatre of devotion, a platform for performing spirituality, and a safe environment to sing, dance, and enjoy commensality.</div></div><div><h3>Discussion and implications</h3><div>The study contributes to the literature on how the social lives of economically disadvantaged older women are constrained by local cultural norms and limited opportunities for mobility. The religious tour, along with the process of organising and carrying it out, can be seen as an act of resilience by older women. Policies promoting inclusive ageing and transport infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries must be attuned to forms of mobility that do not neatly fit into categories such as leisure, social, spiritual, or religious.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"72 ","pages":"Article 101302"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143099356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Justin Christensen, Renee Timmers, Jennifer MacRitchie
{"title":"Reassessing the goals of musical activities for people living with dementia: Supporting joint agency, selfhood and couplehood with an embodied and relational approach","authors":"Justin Christensen, Renee Timmers, Jennifer MacRitchie","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101289","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101289","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A risk present in medically informed psychosocial interventions for dementia, including musical interventions, is the potential to overly prioritise the reduction of cognitive decline, which can inadvertently emphasise deterioration and loss of skills and capacities. This focus can lead to disempowering people living with dementia rather than supporting and building on the skills that remain. In this paper, we present approaches linked with a more positive outlook on dementia, examining the strengths that continue in people living with dementia, as evidenced by how they engage in musical activities. We pay specific attention to how people living with dementia use embodied and relational ways of being and interacting with others, as well as the benefits that musical engagement can provide to selfhood, couplehood and agency in a context of change and adaptation due to the development of the condition. We propose a shift in perspective that takes advantage of music's affordances for embodied communication and connection, recognising people living with dementia as active agents with strengths in habituated ways of acting. With this shift we examine how couples can scaffold each other's abilities to reach towards a balanced sense of reciprocity. To further support this balanced reciprocity through embodied and relational aspects of musical participation, we make a proposal for the design of assistive music technologies that will support notions of we-perspective, joint agency and joint action, with each of these providing wellbeing benefits for people living with dementia and their carers. Drawing on the potential effects that embodiment and relationality have on agency, selfhood and couplehood in musical engagement, we present a case for reassessing the goals and design of musical activities and the technologies to support them.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"72 ","pages":"Article 101289"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142707377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Radio dramatization of aging in Harold Pinter's A Slight Ache","authors":"Chen Su","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101290","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101290","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article examines Harold Pinter's 1959 radio play <em>A Slight Ache</em> through the lens of aging. It argues that Pinter utilizes sound-based techniques to heighten the introspective crisis of aging experienced by the protagonist Edward. The matchseller in the play serves as an auditory doppelgänger, representing Edward's unresolved conflict between his youthful self-image and his aging body, a struggle that drives the play's psychological depth. Moreover, the article explores Edward's loneliness via his one-sided dialogues and emotive pauses, as well as his disoriented experience of time and space in his process of aging. Pinter's innovative use of radiophonic devices enhances the introspective depth, encouraging listeners to engage with Edward's experience on a deeply personal level and a more empathetic view of the complexities of growing older.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101290"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142702648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How do we understand ‘age’ and ‘aging’? Cultural constructions of the ‘aging’ experience in British English and Chinese from a linguistic perspective","authors":"Taochen Zhou","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101288","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101288","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study investigates the cognitive constructions surrounding the aging experience in British English and Mandarin Chinese. The study employs corpus data to explore how fixed phrases manifest the perceptions of ‘age’, ‘aging’, and by extension ‘old age’. It lays out the linguistic patterns that are common in each language. By analyzing the similarities and differences, the findings show that the same biological phenomenon is not expressed in the same linguistic patterns consistently across languages, and that culture plays an important role in structuring conceptual preferences. Most distinctively, ‘age’ in Chinese can be a separate entity with an upward-oriented path on the aging JOURNEY which is unfound in English. This study sheds light on the associations between language, thought and culture to foster sensitive communication under the background that aging perceptions may have an impact on older adults' general wellbeing and health behavior.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101288"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142702650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sarah McGann , Holly Farley , Caroline Bulsara , Anahita Sal Moslehian
{"title":"Socio-spatial analysis of Australian residential care facilities: A case study of traditional, medium, and small household models","authors":"Sarah McGann , Holly Farley , Caroline Bulsara , Anahita Sal Moslehian","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101287","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101287","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>While it is imperative to develop building design innovation to adapt to new care models and organisational processes in residential care facilities, there is a lack of research evidence on the interplay between design and resident lived experience, particularly when examined through a building design lens. This study aims to explore the building design factors that contribute to residents' quality of life (QoL), and thus, their ability to find <em>home</em>. The research objectives are to: 1) document and analyse the layout and spatial design of three different typologies (Traditional, Medium, and Small Household models) against key QoL themes and the residents' everyday lived use and sense of feeling at <em>home</em>; and 2) compare the architectural, layout, and lived use of the three typologies through a socio-spatial lens. Employing a mixed methods approach, incorporating architectural and ethnographic research strategies, we identified six key design concepts encompassing 14 factors that might be related to residents' quality of life. The research highlights distinct everyday lived use and spatial adaptation among the three building typologies, with the Small Household case study standing out for providing an excellent holistic setting, resulting in high levels of observed QoL. This paper also suggests practical insights into improving building design briefs.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101287"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142702649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Aging together-with: The growing older of humans, non-humans and more-than-humans. A commentary","authors":"Stephen Katz","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101280","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101280","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This Commentary discusses the key areas of thought brought together in this special issue on ‘Aging Together-With: The Growing Older of Humans, Non-Humans and More-Than-Humans’, edited by Michela Cozza and Anna Wanka. In particular, the articles in this issue present original and insightful discussions about the relational, material, embodied and interactive nature of ‘aging together-with’ environments, technologies, animals and pets, and more, across plural and hybrid temporalities and vital spaces of life. My writing both looks outward to where this issue critiques and advances current trends in aging studies and inward to reflect on my own contributions to these trends.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101280"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142654614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hidden in plain sight: Women and gendered dementia dynamics in the Australian Aged Care Royal Commission","authors":"Kristina Chelberg , Linda Steele","doi":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101285","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jaging.2024.101285","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Dementia is known to unequally affect women, whether as women living with dementia, or women who provide unwaged or paid care, yet dementia and long-term care (‘LTC’) research and policy often ignore gender. Using Australia as a case study and building on critical dementia, critical disability, and feminist scholarship, this discourse analysis study explored representations in the Australian Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety (‘ACRC’) Final Report of experiences of women with dementia, and women care partners of people with dementia, using long-term care. This paper argues gender remained an overlooked topic in relation to dementia in the ACRC Final Report. This paper found women and dementia were co-constructed according to normative gendered scripts of passive femininity. In particular, harms experienced by women with dementia in long-term care were overlooked, while the feminised labour of women care partners was taken for granted. In failing to address normative gendered patterns, the ACRC Final Report entrenches rather than unseats marginalisation of women in dementia research and policy and is a missed opportunity to address gendered labour, discrimination and harms in long-term care. Ultimately, the paper highlights the need to recognise long-term care as a key site for critical dementia and feminist scholarly and activist interventions and intersectional approaches in reforms.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47935,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aging Studies","volume":"71 ","pages":"Article 101285"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142654196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}