Putting Age into Place: John Mighton’s Half Life and Joan Barfoot’s Exit Lines

This paper addresses cultural constructions of old age in two contemporary Canadian care home narratives. While John Mighton’s play Half Life (2005) is set in a prison-like long-term care facility that is represented as a site of homogenization, oppression, and infantilization, Joan Barfoot’s novel Exit Lines (2008) plays in a hotel-like retirement lodge for wealthy customers that, despite its authoritarian manager, functions as a site of meaningful identity development and intragenerational relationships. What both texts have in common, however, is that they focus on residents’ individual resistance, subversion, and agency, thus opposing the ageist stereotype of decline and deconstructing prevailing norms and negative images of old age as merely physical decrepitude and disease. How is the space of the care home narrated in these two contemporary Canadian texts, and what role do aspects of space and place play for the narrative construction of old age? In this paper, I argue that the spatiality of aging is a category that needs to be incorporated into both an analysis of literary representations of the “fourth age” and an exploration of critical issues of space and place. The juxtaposition of two caregiving institutions in recent Canadian fction contributes to revealing how old age is imagined at the beginning of the twenty-frst century

Putting Age into Place

This paper addresses cultural constructions of old age in two contemporary Canadian care home narratives. While John Mighton’s play Half Life (2005) is set in a prison-like long-term care facility that is represented as a site of homogenization, oppression, and infantilization, Joan Barfoot’s novel Exit Lines (2008) plays in a hotel-like retirement lodge for wealthy customers that, despite its authoritarian manager, functions as a site of meaningful identity development and intragenerational relationships. What both texts have in common, however, is that they focus on residents’ individual resistance, subversion, and agency, thus opposing the ageist stereotype of decline and deconstructing prevailing norms and negative images of old age as merely physical decrepitude and disease. How is the space of the care home narrated in these two contemporary Canadian texts, and what role do aspects of space and place play for the narrative construction of old age? In this paper, I argue that the spatiality of aging is a category that needs to be incorporated into both an analysis of literary representations of the “fourth age” and an exploration of critical issues of space and place. The juxtaposition of two caregiving institutions in recent Canadian fction contributes to revealing how old age is imagined at the beginning of the twenty-frst century

„They say we messed it up. Killing the planet with our own greed“ : Alternswissenschaftliche Überlegungen zu einem generationengerechten Klimadiskurs in Margaret Atwoods „Torching the Dusties“

(VLID)494864

The ages of life’: Living and aging in conflict?

The discourse of positive aging has become the central plank upon which international and national aging policies are constructed. Moreover, an increasing number of popular writers are advocating positive aging as a means to age actively, successively, and productively. These include authors of self-help books, media personalities, as well as writers from psychology and the social sciences As many gerontologists point out, rationales supporting positive aging convey a common message that later life is a time of opportunity and ‘old age’ a state to be resisted, whilst treating ‘disengagement’ from society or the marginalization of ‘pensioned retirement’ as a moral or personal failing. Such a stance is a sharp turn away from modern visions of aging policy, popular during the 1970s and 1980s, where older people were generally expected to embrace a passive lifestyle wholly dependent upon state welfare policy. One key problem, however, is that rationales advocating positive aging are generally embedded in a neo-liberal ideology that encourages individuals to become ‘entrepreneurs of themselves,’ behaving according to the ideal of economic markets, and choosing the optimal courses of action that maximize their interests. Positive aging thus overlooks how in capitalism the drive of human beings to self-develop tends to be captive to the ideological hegemony of the commoditization of culture. This argument is presented in four sections. Whilst the first part focuses on the genealogy and key tenets of positive aging, the second section presents some international policies advocating the goal of positive aging. The third section provides a constructive critique of positive aging, stressing its neo-liberal bias, and hence, its limitations as a social change program. The final part forwards recommendations that function to improve the democratic credentials of positive aging.peer-reviewe

Nach Amerika nämlich! - Jüdische Migrationen in die Amerikas im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. (“To America!” Jewish Migrations to the Americas in the 19th and 20th Centuries)

Luz Angélica Kirschner is a contributing author, “Cecilia Absatz’s Los años pares or the Challenges of Reevaluating Autochthonous Latinamericanism.” How make migrants their respective new social environment, and how changes the identity? Since their discovery in the late 15th century North and South America are real and imagined refuge and hope for people from all over the world. Especially as a universal historical phenomenon but migration is very closely linked to the Jewish history of the last centuries. The contributions of the collection do not only ask the triggering factors for migrations and the gradients of the same, but also after arising from migration cultural exchange.https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/mlgs_book/1002/thumbnail.jp