“To Understand All Life as Fragile, Valuable, and Interdependent”

As old age garners more attention in the time of COVID-19, this roundtable discussion brings together scholars from three different areas within aging studies to define the field’s terms and map out some of its contours and potential future directions. Stephen Katz draws on poststructuralist theory, feminism, and theories of materiality and embodiment in his historically informed work in critical gerontology. Kavita Sivaramakrishnan’s research in global public health and South Asian history brought her to the study of physiological old age as it intersects with social histories in the global South, thus critiquing Eurocentric epistemologies of aging. Pat Thane is a social historian interested in old age in relation to gender, labor, inequality, and welfare states, as well as the long arc of the meaning of old age in the West.