This book outlines the methodology and results of the Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing Project, led by a research team from Brunel University, UK. It investigates how older people resist stereotypical cultural representations of ageing and demonstrates the importance of narrative understanding to social agency.

Mix the latest and most rigorous scientific research, irrepressible old-fashioned entrepreneurship, and the ancient human desire to live forever (or at least a lot longer) and the result is today’s exploding multibillion-dollar antiaging industry. Its achievements are so far mostly marginal, but its promises flow with all the allure of a twenty-first-century fountain of youth. In Eternity Soup, acclaimed science writer Greg Critser takes us to every outpost of the antiaging landsc...

This collection on researching later life and ageing critically reflects upon the qualitative methods used in gaining knowledge of under-researched groups of older people and sets out future research agendas.

This collection critically examines twenty-first century representations of ageing, focusing on various media images and discourses as well as individuals' own experiences and self-presentations of ageing, drawing on innovative new empirical data.

This book explores the adoption of 'active ageing' policies by EU15 nations and the impact on older peoples' work and retirement policy options. Policies examined include unemployment benefits, active labour market policies, partial pension receipt, pension principles, early retirement and incentives for deferral.

This book provides insights into the theoretical framework of 'tensions' related to care for children and the elderly. It analyzes if, and under what conditions, welfare state reforms have contributed to strengthening existing tensions, creating new tensions, or relaxing such tensions.

This book develops a comprehensive understanding of the motivations and experiences of students who choose to study abroad for the whole or part of a degree. It includes case studies of students from East Asia, Europe and the UK, and considers the implications of their movement for contemporary higher education.

While this book was written for male Baby Boomers and their significant others, it also includes Boomer history and what lies ahead as we experience the decade of our own sixties. This story reviews our Boomer luck, recounts the great history of being a kid in the 1950s, and the great opportunities provided by improved education in the 1960s, not to ignore a seemingly mind expanding culture. Turning sixty is not for the faint hearted. There are issues ahead. The first thing we all face is ...

Will the future be a climate disaster? Will biotechnologies bring huge improvements to lifespan? Predictions vary, but children's status as human embodiments of the future puts them at the centre of attempts to shape the world and the discipline of childhood studies can therefore make a critical and creative contribution to future-making.

The demise of state Socialisms caused radical social, cultural and economic changes in Eastern Europe. Since then, young people have been confronted with fundamental disruptions and transformations to their daily environment, while an unsettling, globalized world substantially reshapes local belongings and conventional values. In times of multiple instabilities and uncertainties, this volume argues, young people prefer to try to adjust to given circumstances than to adopt the behaviour of ...

This unique book sheds new light on the most invisible members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. Hidden from view by a combination of prevailing cultural assumptions and their own unwillingness to be seen, older lesbians have been consistently under-represented in both popular culture and research. This ground-breaking study, based on an unprecedentedly large research sample of nearly four hundred lesbian-identified women between the ages of 60 and 90, offers ...

There is both a timeliness and a transcendent 'rightness' in the fact that scholars, clinicians, and health professionals are beginning to examine the ethics-based components of decision making in health care of the elderly. Ethics - as the discipline concerned with right or wrong conduct and moral duty - pervades hospital rooms, nursing home corridors, physicians' offices, and the halls of Congress as decisions are made that concern the allocation of health-related services to individuals...