From Retirement to Active Aging: Changing Images of ‘Old Age’ in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries

2015 ◽  
pp. 165-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Lessenich
Author(s):  
Luis Roniger ◽  
Leonardo Senkman ◽  
Saúl Sosnowski ◽  
Mario Sznajder

This book explores how Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay have been affected by postexilic relocations, transnational migrant displacements, and diasporas. It provides a systematic analysis of the formation of exile communities and diaspora politics, the politics of return, and the agenda of democratization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, focusing on the impact of intellectuals, academics, activists, and public figures who had experienced exile on the reconstitution and transformation of their societies following democratization. Readers are offered a kaleidoscope of intellectual itineraries, debates, and contributions held in the public domain by individuals who confronted and fought authoritarian rule. The book covers their contributions to the restructuring and transformation of scientific disciplines and of the humanities and the arts, as well as their collective institutional impact on higher education, science and technology, and public institutions. Bringing together sociopolitical, cultural, and policy analysis with the testimonies of dozens of intellectuals, academics, political activists, and policymakers, the book addresses the impact of exile on people’s lives and on their fractured experiences, the debates and prospects of return, the challenges of dis-exile and postexilic trends, and, finally, the ways in which those who experienced exile impacted democratized institutions, public culture, and discourse. It also follows some crucial shifts in the frontiers of citizenship, moving analysis to transnational connections and permanent diasporas, including the diasporas of knowledge that increasingly changed the very meaning of being national and transnational, while connecting those countries to the global arena.


Author(s):  
Youssef Cassis ◽  
Giuseppe Telesca

Why were elite bankers and financiers demoted from ‘masters’ to ‘servants’ of society after the Great Depression, a crisis to which they contributed only marginally? Why do they seem to have got away with the recent crisis, in spite of their palpable responsibilities in triggering the Great Recession? This chapter provides an analysis of the differences between the bankers of the Great Depression and their colleagues of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century—regarding their position within, and attitude towards the firm, work culture, mental models, and codes of conduct—complemented with a scrutiny of the public discourse on bankers and financiers before and after the two crises. The authors argue that the (relative) mildness of the Great Recession, compared to the Great Depression, has contributed to preserve elite bankers’ and financiers’ status, income, wealth, and influence. Yet, the long-term consequences of their loss of reputational capital are difficult to assess.


Author(s):  
Linda Freedman

The questions that drove Blake’s American reception, from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century through to the explosion of Blakeanism in the mid-twentieth century, did not disappear. Visions of America continued to be part of Blake’s late twentieth- and early twenty-first century American legacy. This chapter begins with the 1982 film Blade Runner, which was directed by the British Ridley Scott but had an American-authored screenplay and was based on a 1968 American novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It moves to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film, Dead Man and Paul Chan’s twenty-first century social activism as part of a protest group called The Friends of William Blake, exploring common themes of democracy, freedom, limit, nationhood, and poetic shape.


Author(s):  
Peter Lurie

American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the most compelling manifestations of America’s troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic’s founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane, and directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick, present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in their characters’ racial understanding, an obtuseness or naivety that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with—and implicitly critical of—the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. The book thus restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white, bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty.


Author(s):  
Lisa Heldke

John Dewey’s record as a feminist and an advocate of women is mixed. He valued women intellectual associates whose influences he acknowledged, but did not develop theoretical articulations of the reasons for women’s subordination and marginalization. Given his mixed record, this chapter asks, how useful is Dewey’s work as a resource for feminist philosophy? It begins with a survey of the intellectual influences that connect Dewey with a set of women family members, colleagues, and students. It then discusses Dewey’s influence on the work of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century pragmatist feminist philosophers. Dewey’s influence has been strongest in the fields of feminist epistemology, philosophy of education, and social and political philosophy. Although pragmatist feminist philosophy remains a small field within feminist philosophy, this chapter argues that its conceptual resources could be put to further good use, particularly in feminist metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory.


Author(s):  
Stuart Gray

How can scholars critically engage premodern Indic traditions without falling prey to Hindu conservatism or Brahmanical-Hindu apologism? This question is pressing for Indic political theory and contemporary Indian democracy because of ethnically exclusivist, Hindu nationalist movements that have emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This chapter argues that a positive answer to the question must begin by taking seriously the tremendous pluralism in India’s political and philosophical history, which requires systematically engaging with premodern source material and uncovering the internal pluralism within a longer and larger Brahmanical-Hindu tradition of political thought. The author explains how it is both possible and politically necessary to internally subvert Brahmanical-Hindu political thought, which can help diffuse essentialist and exclusivist arguments coming from the Hindu right. Locating such plurality and engaging in internal subversion can help challenge historical justifications for Indian nationalism and contribute to decolonization, thus contesting the Hindu right on its own conceptual and genealogical turf. To advance this argument, the author provides a critical reinterpretation of the infamous “Puruṣa Sūkta,” which is often viewed as the locus classicus of the modern caste system, providing a novel interpretation that challenges caste hierarchy and supplies new resources for democratic thought and practice in India.


Healthcare ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 240
Author(s):  
MiJung Eum ◽  
HyungSeon Kim

With the increase in the aging population worldwide, social interest in having a vibrant and valuable old age has been increasing with changes in the perspectives on old age. This study aimed to determine the relationship between active aging and health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in middle-aged and older Korean using national data. The subjects were 14,117 adults aged ≥55 years. HRQOL was evaluated using the EuroQol–5 Dimension (EQ-5D) questionnaire, and active aging was defined based on the health factors, participation factors, and security factors. The average EQ-5D score was 91.04 ± 0.143. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis sequentially inputting the health, participation, and security factors showed that health factors had the strongest influence on HRQOL (F = 216.656, p < 0.001). In the final model, which included all variables, activity limit (B = −10.477, p < 0.001) and subjective health status (B = −7.282, p < 0.001) were closely related to the HRQOL. In addition, economic activity, income level, home ownership, private health insurance, and unmet healthcare needs were associated with HRQOL. The R2 of the model was 38.2%. To improve the HRQOL of middle-aged and older people, it is necessary to consider active aging factors. Furthermore, follow-up studies using various indicators reflecting active aging should be conducted.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Friederike Enßle ◽  
Ilse Helbrecht

Abstract This article aims to enhance the conceptual debate on diversity in old age by exploring the interplay of diversity in later life and images of old age. We argue that the analysis of images of old age on the micro-level is a fruitful methodology in order to unravel the meaning of diversity in later life. Drawing on findings from qualitative research in Berlin, we explore how new and diverse imaginations, experiences and lifestyles of old age emerge. The conceptual focus on images of old age enables us to investigate further what diversity in later life comprises and how it simultaneously fosters the genesis of new images of old age. The manifold new images we found in our research suggest that prevalent societal discourses about old age on the macro-level are rather deceptive and represent mostly stereotypes such as ‘active agers’ or ‘frail and dependent elders’. We offer three explanations why alternative images of old age are currently barely present in public discourse: (a) the actors transmitting images of age; (b) the institutionalisation of the images; and (c) the challenge to communicate complexity. We conclude by suggesting that images of old age are a promising starting point to explore and make visible both the diversity of social groups within the older generation as well as the heterogeneity of older individuals.


Fitoterapia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-61
Author(s):  
V. V. Krutov ◽  

Keywords: health, Spirit, energy, synergistic approach, gerontology, quality longevity, allopathic medicine, informational-energetic medicine. The article discusses the issue of active aging strategies that differ from those used in traditional medicine. Practice shows that the resources of the latter are insufficient for successfully overcoming the systemic problems of people, growing with aging and maximum in old age. The accumulation of the problematic nature of the physical body in long-lived people requires a special, comprehensive approach to treatment with penetration into the root nature of a person. Based on innovative knowledge, including data from his own research, the author is talking about a synergistic approach that includes, along with the existing practice of treating the elderly, methods of informational- energetic medicine. Medicine, working at the level of the subtle, causal sphere of a person, where the roots of all his diseases lie and are revealed. This way of solving, the author believes, bears the maximum healing effect for the body on all levels of its multidimensionality – substance, information, energy.


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