Walking on the edge: meanings of living in an ageing body and using a walker in everyday life - a phenomenological hermeneutic study

2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 116-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helene Brännström ◽  
Margit Bäckman ◽  
Regina Santamäki Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Jessica A. Gish ◽  
Amanda M. Grenier ◽  
Brenda Vrkljan

The integration of mechanical and digital technology (e.g., back-up cameras) into the automobile is changing the experience of driving. This chapter examines the “fit” between the ageing body with ‘low-tech’ auto-biographies and the technological vehicle. The chapter begins with an outline of how the dominant ‘human factors’ approach examines older-driver car interaction and identify the shortcomings of this approach. To address these limitations, the chapter adopts a critical, phenomenological, and embodied approach and ethnographic methods that reveal everyday descriptions of driving. This demonstrates a focus on corporeality provides the means to reveal how technology can change ‘inner’ driving experience at sensory, affective, and habitual levels, and inspire particular bodily and cognitive responses as part of the process of adaptability. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how attention to the ageing body can improve human factors research on older driver-car interaction and add to the current sociological discussions on everyday life.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilie Givskov

During the 20th and 21st century, media such as radio, telephone, television, computers and cell phones moved into everyday life as taken-for-granted elements. Based on observations and life-history interviews with 22 older women, this article discusses how media technology is materially involved in the experience of growing old. The analysis reveals two aspects of this. First, different technology stands out from its background presence as problematic because the media no longer enable the experiences they used to. Second, disconnects with and through media technology direct attention towards the declining body. The participants embody ‘old age’ by linking their experience with media to two cultural constructions of material ageing: generation and natural ageing. I argue that inasmuch as everyday life has become mediatized, the experience of growing old also takes place with and through media technology. This article forms part of ‘Media and the Ageing Body’ Special Issue.


2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ketevan Mamiseishvili

In this paper, I will illustrate the changing nature and complexity of faculty employment in college and university settings. I will use existing higher education research to describe changes in faculty demographics, the escalating demands placed on faculty in the work setting, and challenges that confront professors seeking tenure or administrative advancement. Boyer’s (1990) framework for bringing traditionally marginalized and neglected functions of teaching, service, and community engagement into scholarship is examined as a model for balancing not only teaching, research, and service, but also work with everyday life.


2011 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet B. Ruscher

Two distinct spatial metaphors for the passage of time can produce disparate judgments about grieving. Under the object-moving metaphor, time seems to move past stationary people, like objects floating past people along a riverbank. Under the people-moving metaphor, time is stationary; people move through time as though they journey on a one-way street, past stationary objects. The people-moving metaphor should encourage the forecast of shorter grieving periods relative to the object-moving metaphor. In the present study, participants either received an object-moving or people-moving prime, then read a brief vignette about a mother whose young son died. Participants made affective forecasts about the mother’s grief intensity and duration, and provided open-ended inferences regarding a return to relative normalcy. Findings support predictions, and are discussed with respect to interpersonal communication and everyday life.


2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 138-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Oettingen ◽  
Doris Mayer ◽  
Babette Brinkmann

Mental contrasting of a desired future with present reality leads to expectancy-dependent goal commitments, whereas focusing on the desired future only makes people commit to goals regardless of their high or low expectations for success. In the present brief intervention we randomly assigned middle-level managers (N = 52) to two conditions. Participants in one condition were taught to use mental contrasting regarding their everyday concerns, while participants in the other condition were taught to indulge. Two weeks later, participants in the mental-contrasting condition reported to have fared better in managing their time and decision making during everyday life than those in the indulging condition. By helping people to set expectancy-dependent goals, teaching the metacognitive strategy of mental contrasting can be a cost- and time-effective tool to help people manage the demands of their everyday life.


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