Introduction

In this chapter, I explore human development and the life course as precarious forms of life. The first part reviews the literature on precarity to draw out some of the critical and ethical issues related to ageing populations. The second part follows with an examination of how figures of the obese child, unstable adolescent, despairing mid-lifer and cognitively impaired older adult are examples of crisisladen personifications of social problems. The two parts are connected through an approach similar to what Imogen Tyler (2008, p 18) calls a ‘figurative methodology’, whereby ‘social classifications’ are generated by ‘representational struggles’ that in turn are ‘played out in highly condensed figurative forms’:

While these figurative forms for Tyler are British class-making identities, here they are age-making ones. Rather than adhering to any one biological, psychological or gerontological model, my perspective on human development and the life course focuses on their discursive and interchangeable meanings in the social sphere, where the human sciences, public health politics and cultural narratives about ageing have converged.

The chapter's conclusions consider and compare resilience and resistance as two responses to life course precarity. Resilience, in ageing research and associated professional practices, typically refers to the natural capacity of individuals, families and communities to cope with and bounce back from adversity. As such, resilience offers a corrective to passive and pathologizing stereotypes of older adults as deficient in adaptability, agency and resourcefulness. However, this meaning also implies that any failure to manage vulnerability, frailty, disability and dependency is because of a lack of personal resilience rather than the social determinants of liveability. In this way the resilience literature reiterates the successful and healthy ageing models it claims to supersede. My conclusions advocate a second response, however, which is to refuse to be the subjects we have become, to pursue alternative paths that contest dominant global life course hierarchies and their fashioning of age identities through crisis, precarity and resilience, and to imagine new strategies for radical and non-precarious life course trajectories into the future.

In a previous project on Canadian ‘snowbird’ culture, I interviewed retired Canadians at their winter retirement residences in Florida, where they spend up to six months of the year escaping Canadian winters (Katz, 2005). It was an enlightening experience, not only for learning about residents’ backgrounds and life plans, but also about how they organised and negotiated their movements between two countries, climates, cultures and homes. Our meetings in Florida usually began with a home tour, as the residents proudly pointed out which cherished objects, mementos, gifts and photographs they chose to bring with them from Canada and what special memories and personal stories each evoked. Walking with the residents through their gardens was also a chance for me to see how they personalised their outdoor spaces to express their lives in Florida as both rooted and temporary. Aside from the interviews, I found that the world of snowbirds was brought to life through its rhythms and motions, where ‘home’ could include several familiar places between ‘here’ and ‘there’, along with the nomadic excursions between them. While gerontology has always had a strong commitment to environmental ‘person-fit’ and ‘ageing-in-place’ research, such research prioritises health-related problems of housing modification and design, residential displacement and relocation, and community care resources. The mobility of snowbirds poses something different, because it raises new questions about the relationships between biography, place, flow and settlement and their materialities. Things such as vehicles, plants, kitchen items, medicines, clothing, pictures and books were important conveyers of such relationships, as were virtual connectivity and social media, international newspapers, foods, recreational centres, healthcare services and volunteer organisations. Hence, in hindsight this research project was an education in material culture, as a realm of use and consumption, and as one of lived and symbolic significance. As such, it inspires this part of the book on ageing and materialities.

Material culture and the materialities of social worlds are familiar themes in European and American everyday sociologies; however, their application of material analyses to ageing and later life has been wanting. Thus, the idea of materialities in this part of the book serves as a conceptual starting point for understanding how specific experiences and identities of older people are grounded in their material contexts.

This book is a timely collection that explores the materialities and embodiments of growing older today, opening onto a richly interdisciplinary field of imaginative research about subjective lives and social worlds. We use ‘materialities’ as a term to identify the various places, technologies, things, rhythms, designs, mobilities and environments in which our experience of ageing is grounded and observable. ‘Embodiments’ is a complementary term we use to highlight the ways in which the cultural processes of ageing are physically mediated and experienced. For example, menopause or longevity may be obvious corporeal events, but they are embodied as subjectively meaningful through cultural and symbolic practices. By focusing on materialities and embodiments, this book's premise is that understanding ageing invites a commitment to witnessing, interpreting, documenting and caring about our intimate and daily worlds of meaning. The contributors to this volume, all experts in ageing and critical gerontological scholarship, make original forays into these everyday worlds. They select often taken-for-granted moments, spaces, things and experiences that evoke what it means to grow older, creating guidelines to thinking further about the consequences of new political, economic and global changes for older generations and ageing populations. While this book is about Western societies, its theoretical and methodological contributions to ageing studies are envisioned as relevant to other parts of the world, especially those experiencing the prospects and challenges of expanding ageing populations.

I was inspired to create this volume by my years of presenting, teaching and publishing research on ageing. I have been fortunate to be part of a community of critical gerontologists who have introduced to ageing studies influential concepts and resourceful methods from traditions outside of gerontology, in particular Marxist political economy, phenomenology, feminism, LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) and disability studies, the health humanities, media and performance studies, post-structuralism, and social studies of science and technology. I am also grateful that my work and collaborations have been included in leading texts on critical gerontology (Katz, 2003, 2010), cultural gerontology (Katz, 2015), feminist age studies (Katz, 1999; Marshall and Katz, 2006), the gerontological humanities (Katz, 2000; Katz and McHugh, 2010) and ageing futures (Katz and Whitehouse, 2017)

One of my long-term interests, and one that inspires this part of the book, is the ageing body. In my earlier Foucauldian studies (Katz, 1996), I examined the historical disciplines, texts and rationalities that transformed the aged body into a separable senile form of life, encompassing new scientific truths about ageing. In more recent work, I have reviewed research on ageing and falling, and what I term the ‘phenomenology of gravity’ (Katz, 2015), to suggest that understanding bodily ageing invites a phenomenological and material explanation of the relationships that connect environment, experience and subjectivity. With this research I also became more aware of the academic tendency to neglect older and vulnerable ‘fourth age’ bodies, along with general ageist assumptions in the literature that loss of physical control symbolises a passage into status decline.

My work and that of others (for example, Öberg, 1996; Faircloth, 2003; Gilleard and Higgs, 2013) has grown in reaction to problems of the absent ageing body and embodiment in gerontology and related fields, where the body's role in later life continues to be depicted as a rather passive and homogeneous effect of health, risk and longevity ‘factors’. As Gilleard and Higgs remark about ageing research, ‘While population ageing, ageing as “risk” or “vulnerability” and ageing as status change are important academic preoccupations, it is the ageing of bodies that remains the ineradicable concern of persons, confronting, in their own ageing body, the essential intransience of their lives’ (2013, p 21). At the same time, the ageing body is largely sidelined within the influential sub-field of the sociology of body itself (see, for example, Crossley, 2006; Petersen, 2007; Shilling, 2012), whose proponents’ critiques of consumer society and social regulation rarely include the commercialisation of ‘active ageing’ lifestyles or anti-ageing products, which have grown increasingly ubiquitous. One response to the problem of the absent ageing body has been the work of sociologists and critical gerontologists such as Mike Featherstone and Mike Hepworth (1998), Julia Twigg (2006), Wainwright and Turner (2006) and Emmanuelle Tulle (2008), who look to the embodiment of the life course in everyday cultures such as sport, dance and care.