New ESRC funded Seminar Series
Monday 7 December 2009
The 'New' Ageing Populations: Mapping identities, health, needs and responses across the lifecourse
The ESRC Seminar series is an academic collaboration between King’s College London (Dr Karen Lowton, Senior Lecturer in Ageing & Health, Institute of Gerontology), University College London (Paul Higgs, Professor of the Sociology of Ageing, Division of Research Strategy) and the University of Surrey (Dr Karen Ballard, Senior Lecturer in Women's Health, Postgraduate Medical School).
There has been considerable public interest in the social and health-related effects of population ageing and increasing longevity on the developed and developing world. These impacts are not only demographic but also epidemiological, with the weight of disease and disability now being experienced largely by older people. However, contemporaneous advances in preventative and curative medicine, as well as changes in the social contexts in which health interventions are delivered, have enabled many people to live a longer and healthier life than was possible a few decades ago, either by surviving childhood due to these advances, living longer lives due to continuing medical advances changing the course and nature of disease, or living past an earlier ‘failure’ of regulation.
There is now a greater realisation that what actually constitutes ‘ageing’ is becoming more difficult to demarcate, whether in terms of physiological ‘normality,’ cultural expectations, or social provision. Changes to the patterning and nature of ‘old age’ therefore raise important questions about our understanding of the contemporary circumstances surrounding ageing for researchers, providers and policy makers alike.
The aim of this seminar series is to map the nature of the emergence of rapid recent growth and ageing of populations not normally associated with ‘old age’, widen debates of health, identity, disability and ageing by examining and presenting from multiple perspectives the impact on, and implications of, biomedical science on the rapid growth of new ageing populations, focusing on those in mid- to later life, and present these viewpoints through a number of perspectives, and address the implications that arise from this.
The first seminar entitled 'Why Study New Ageing Populations?', in on Monday 25th January 2010 at the Council Room, King's College London.
For further information about all six seminars in the series please click here
