Paul Higgs

Chris Gilleard

A groundbreaking exploration of the sociology of dementia — with contributions from distinguished international scholars and practitioners. Organised around the four themes of personhood, care, social representations and social differentiation, Ageing, Dementia and the Social Mind provides a critical look at how modern concepts and assumptions regarding dementia can benefit from sociology and other disciplines. This collection addresses the gaps in our sociological knowledge of dementia and provides a forum for the development of new themes and perspectives within the health social sciences. This important work breaks new ground in giving specific attention to the social and cultural dimensions of responses to dementia. A valuable and long overdue addition to the literature on medical sociology, Ageing, Dementia and the Social Mind will undoubtedly have broad international appeal to academics, researchers and higher-level students of gerontology, health, nursing and social work, as well as those employed within social and health care.

Ageing, Dementia and the Social Mind

As the population ages, this book reveals how divides that are apparent through childhood and working life change and are added to in later life.

Difference, Diversity and Inequality

Social Divisions and Later Life

‘Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment’ outlines and develops an argument about the emergence of a ‘new ageing’ during the second half of the twentieth century and its realisation through the processes of ‘embodiment’. The authors argue that ageing as a unitary social process and agedness as a distinct social location have lost much of their purchase on the social imagination. Instead, this work asserts that later life has become as much a field for ‘not becoming old’ as of ‘old age’. The volume locates the origins of this transformation in the cultural ferment of the 1960s, when new forms of embodiment concerned with identity and the care of the self arose as mass phenomena. Over time, these new forms of embodiment have been extended, changing the traditional relationship between body, age and society by making struggles over the care of the self central to the cultures of later life.

Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment

With the aspiration for a long life now achievable for many individuals, the status of old age as a distinct social position has become problematic. In this radical re-examination of the nature of old age, Paul Higgs and Chris Gilleard reveal the emergence of a 'fourth age' that embodies the most feared and marginalised aspects of old age, conceptually linked to and yet distinct from traditional models of old age. Inspired by the authors' ground-breaking work on the third and fourth age and supported by extensive sociological, medical and historical research, Rethinking Old Age offers a unique and timely analysis of the fourth age as a 'social imaginary' that is shaped and maintained by the social, cultural and political discourses and practices that divide later life. It stands as a significant resource for students, academics and practitioners of Sociology, Ageing Studies, Gerontology, Social Policy, Health Studies, Social Work and Nursing.

Chris Gilleard

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