Download or read book Aging Our Way Independent Elders Interdependent Lives written by Meika Loe and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America is quickly going grey. There are more Americans alive today over the age of 80 than ever before in our history; by 2030, that number is expected to almost triple. But when we discuss how long people live, we must also consider how well they live. Aging Our Way follows the everyday lives of 30 elders (ages 85-102) living at home and mostly alone to understand how they create and maintain meaningful lives for themselves. Through extensive interviews, Meika Loe explores how elders navigate the practical challenges of living as independently as possible while staying healthy, connected, and comfortable. Aging Our Way celebrates these men and women as they really are: lively, complicated, engaging people finding creative ways to make their aging as meaningful and manageable as possible. Written with remarkable warmth and depth of understanding, Aging Our Way offers a vivid look at a group of people who too often remain invisible--those who have lived the longest - and all they have to teach us.
Download or read book Aging Our Way written by Meika Loe and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-03 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elders 85 years and older are the fastest growing segment of the population in the U.S. and in many other countries. Aging Our Way examines how the very old navigate the challenges of loneliness, disability, and loss, while staying healthy, connected, and comfortable.
Download or read book Gerontology written by Madonna Harrington Meyer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by established and emerging leaders in a broad array of disciplines, this two-volume set provides undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, professionals, and policymakers with an overview of the field of aging that examines the social landscape as well as key changes, challenges, and solutions. The people who make up the rapidly growing population of Americans over age 65 are changing, and as a result, our nation will change. This shift presents new issues, controversies, and challenges that affect health, wellness, welfare, retirement, politics, and economics. This two-volume work examines where we are and where we are headed, paying careful attention to the differential impacts of gender, race, class, marital status, and other social variables. It considers key changes in demographics, old-age policies, families, work, and death and dying. Volume one covers an array of demographic issues, policies, and politics, highlighting how factors such as gender and race shape families, income, retirement, immigrants, and veterans across the life course. The second volume covers education, religion, volunteering, exercise, nutrition, and health care policies across the life course. Topics addressed include the old-age welfare state, the extension of retirement age, home care, care work, nursing home care, end of life planning, and euthanasia.
Download or read book Shameful Bodies written by Michelle Mary Lelwica and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when your body doesn't look how it's supposed to look, or feel how it's supposed to feel, or do what it's supposed to do? Who or what defines the ideals behind these expectations? How can we challenge them and live more peacefully in our bodies? Shameful Bodies: Religion and the Culture of Physical Improvement explores these questions by examining how traditional religious narratives and modern philosophical assumptions come together in the construction and pursuit of a better body in contemporary western societies. Drawing on examples from popular culture such as self-help books, magazines, and advertisements, Michelle Mary Lelwica shows how these narratives and assumptions encourage us to go to war against our bodies-to fight fat, triumph over disability, conquer chronic pain and illness, and defy aging. Through an ethic of conquest and conformity, the culture of physical improvement trains us not only to believe that all bodily processes are under our control, but to feel ashamed about those parts of our flesh that refuse to comply with the cultural ideal. Lelwica argues that such shame is not a natural response to being fat, physically impaired, chronically sick, or old. Rather, body shame is a religiously and culturally conditioned reaction to a commercially-fabricated fantasy of physical perfection. While Shameful Bodies critiques the religious and cultural norms and narratives that perpetuate external and internalized judgment and aggression toward “shameful” bodies, it also engages the resources of religions, especially feminist theologies and Buddhist thought/practice, to construct a more affirming approach to health and healing-an approach that affirms the diversity, fragility, interdependence, and impermanence of embodied life.
Download or read book The Aging Disability Nexus written by Katie Aubrecht and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2020-06-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the global population ages, disability demographics are shifting. Societal transformation and global health inequities have changed who is likely to reach old age, who is likely to live with disability, and the relationship between aging and disability in various socio-cultural and geopolitical contexts. The Aging–Disability Nexus breaks new ground by bringing gerontology and disability studies into dialogue with each other through a variety of empirical, conceptual, and pedagogical approaches. Contributors explore the tensions that shape the way disability and aging are understood, experienced, and responded to at both individual and systemic levels, while avoiding the common tendency to conflate these overlapping elements and map them onto a normative, faulty notion of the human life trajectory. This perceptive work analyzes the distinction between aging with a disability and aging into disability, and reveals how multiple identities, socio-economic forces, culture, and community give form to our experiences.
Download or read book Creating New Meanings For Old Age written by Isabella Paoletti and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Design of Assistive Technology for Ageing Populations written by Andree Woodcock and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on various aspects of research on ageing, including in relation to assistive technology; dignity of aging; how technology can support a greater understanding of the experience of physically aging and cognitive changes; mobility issues associated with the elderly; and emerging technologies. The 80+ age group represents an expanding market, with an estimated worth of £21.4 billion a year. Everyone is affected by this shift in demographics – we are getting older and may become carers – and we need to prepare ourselves and adjust our surroundings for longer life. Products, services and environments have been changing in response to the changing population. Presenting international design research to demonstrate the thinking and ideas shaping design, this book is a valuable resource for designers; product developers; employers; gerontologists; and medical, health and service providers; as well as everyone interested in aging.
Download or read book Our Bodies Not Ourselves written by Kathryn A. Kirigin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1970, the best-seller Our Bodies Ourselves was published. The focus of the authors, the Boston Health Collective, was on the youthful female body: on reproduction, sexuality, genitalia, intimacy and relationships in the context of North American cultural expectations. Our Bodies Not Ourselves is also about the female body—but on women aging from menopause to 100. Like its predecessor, Our Bodies Not Ourselves covers sexuality, genitalia, intimacy, gender norms and relationships. But the aging woman's body has many other issues, from head to toe, from skeleton to skin, and from sleep to motion. The book, an ethnography and Western cultural history of aging and gender, draws upon history, culture and social media, the authors’ own experiences as women of 70, and conversations and correspondence with more than two hundred women aged from 60-ish to 100. They consider the cultural and structural frameworks for contemporary aging: the long sweep of history, gendered cultural norms and the vast commercial and medical marketplaces for maintaining and altering the aging body. Part I, The Private Body, focuses on the embodied experiences of aging within our private households. Part II, The Public Body, explores weight, height, and adornment as old women appear among others. Part III, The Body With Others, sets the embodied experiences of aging women within their sexual and social relationships.
Download or read book The Lotos Eaters written by Carol A. B. Warren and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the baby boom generation ages, there are few ethnographies that capture the dynamics of aging. This new book is based on years of participant observation in "the Sands," a beautiful ocean community of well-off individuals and couples seeking the easy life. Yet the community members contend with deep uncertainties about health as they learn to face the realities of death. Identity, sexuality, gender, and conflict play into a sense of "who belongs where," who is counted a friend or stranger in the struggles of old age. Warren shows how the vicissitudes of the aging body center the present and become anchors for the past and future. Expressed in beautiful literary prose, this book moves beyond wealth to explore the realities of aging in poignant new ways that will enliven discussion in courses on Gerontology, Medical Sociology, Inequality, and many others.
Download or read book Save My Kid written by Amanda M. Gengler and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A frank analysis of the medical and emotional inequalities that pervade the healthcare process for critically ill children Families who have a child with a life-threatening illness face a daunting road ahead of them, one that not only upends their everyday lives, but also strikes at the very heart of parenthood. In “Save My Kid,” Amanda M. Gengler traces the emotional difficulties these families navigate as they confront a fundamentally unequal healthcare system in the United States. Gengler reveals the unrecognized, everyday inequalities tangled up in the process of seeking medical care, showing how different families manage their children’s critical illnesses. She also uncovers the role that emotional goals—deeply rooted in the culture of illness and medicine—play in medical decision-making, healthcare interactions, and the end of children’s lives. A deeply compassionate read, “Save My Kid” is an inside look at inequality in healthcare among those with the most at stake.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of the Medical Humanities written by Alan Bleakley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-31 with total page 875 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This authoritative new handbook offers a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the state of the medical humanities globally, showing how clinically oriented medical humanities, the critical study of medicine as a global historical and cultural phenomenon, and medicine as a force for cultural change can inform each other. Composed of eight parts, the Routledge Handbook of the Medical Humanities looks at the medical humanities as: a network and system therapeutic provocation forms of resistance a way of reconceptualising the medical curriculum concerned with performance and narrative mediated by artists as diagnosticians of culture through public engagement. This book describes how the medical humanities can be used in and out of clinical settings, acting as a point of resistance, redistributing medicine’s capital amongst its stakeholders, embracing the complexity of medical instances, shaping medical education, promoting interdisciplinary understandings and recognising an identity for the medical humanities as a network effect. This book is an essential read for all students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in the medical humanities.
Download or read book Midlife Geographies written by Aija Lulle and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2024-09-23 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 21st century, global demographics are rapidly changing, with a higher population of middle-aged people than ever before. As the ‘sandwich’ generation, people in midlife often experience significant work and intergenerational caring responsibilities, yet they are the subject of relatively little research. This short, accessible book redresses the balance in offering a geographical approach to how people embody and claim space in midlife while analysing the influences of gender, class and location. The author considers midlife in varying sociocultural and geographical contexts, viewed through the lens of the global neoliberal shift.
Download or read book Engaging Geographies written by Juliana Mansvelt and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-19 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume draws together three connected strands of research dealing with landscapes, lifecourses and mobilities, and will be of interest to social and cultural geographers and those in allied social science fields, particularly those with interests in the circulation of people and policy at a number of scales and locations. Landscapes might be considered to be a very mainstream geographical theme, though we treat them in an adventurous way by concentrating on infrastructure and ideology, art and resistance, as well as through a more mainstream exploration of multifunctional landscapes. Attention to diverse aspects of the lifecourse allows us to understand the social, spatial and structural complexities which characterise social relationships from birth to death. Mobilities, likewise, provide an opportunity to draw on some concepts from contemporary social and cultural geography relating to the movement of people and ideas over time and across space. Although much of the substantive content has a New Zealand and Australian orientation, it is presented in a way that engages with broader international literatures.
Download or read book The Rise of Viagra written by Meika Loe and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2004-08-11 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on interviews with men who take the drug, their wives, doctors and pharmacists as well as scientists and researchers in the field, this fascinating account provides an intimate history of the Viagra's effect on America.
Download or read book Learning to Be Old written by Margaret Cruikshank and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2009-01-16 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to grow old in America today? Is 'successful aging' our responsibility? What will happen if we fail to 'grow old gracefully'? Especially for women, the onus on the aging population in the United States is growing rather than diminishing. Gender, race, and sexual orientation have been reinterpreted as socially constructed phenomena, yet aging is still seen through physically constructed lenses. The second edition of Margaret Cruikshank's Learning to Be Old helps put aging in a new light, neither romanticizing nor demonizing it. Featuring new research and analysis, expanded sections on gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender aging and critical gerontology, and an updated chapter on feminist gerontology, the second edition even more thoroughly than the first looks at the variety of different forces affecting the progress of aging. Cruikshank pays special attention to the fears and taboos, multicultural traditions, and the medicalization and politicization of natural processes that inform our understanding of age. Through it all, we learn a better way to inhabit our age whatever it is.
Download or read book Women in Late Life written by Martha Holstein and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-03-19 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary old age is fraught with contradiction and complexity—women portrayed either as incompetent and cuddly grandmothers or as young women trapped in old bodies, images that rarely reflect how women actually see themselves. Women in Late Life explores the thorny issues related to gender and aging, including prevailing but problematic cultural expectations, body image, ageism, the experience of chronic illness, threats to Social Security and the very possibility of a secure retirement while challenging a long-term care system that disadvantages women. Author Martha Holstein writes from a critical feminist perspective, drawing on her many years of experience in gerontology, as well as interviews and personal experience as a woman now in her seventies. The book highlights how women’s experience of late life is shaped by the effects of lifelong gender norms, by contemporary culture—from gender stereotypes to ageism—and by the political context. The book blends critique with proposals aimed at resisting damaging inequities resulting from being simultaneously old and a woman. She focuses on changes needed on multiple levels—societal, cultural, political, and individual. This interdisciplinary look at key questions around gender and aging is nuanced and beautifully written.
Download or read book Economics of Population Aging written by James H. Schulz and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1991 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines claims that aging populations will create serious economic problems for various nations. It examines the question in large part through the eyes of researchers and legislators in three target countries: Australia, Japan, and the United States. These countries were chosen because of similar states of economic development and because all were experiencing a rapid aging of their populations. A comprehensive overview is provided of the economic issues related to aging populations. Several aspects are explored in more depth. To date, it is the most complete and thorough study of economic issues associated with population aging. After a brief review of the phenomenon of demographic aging, the authors give a summary of the major economic programs offered to the aged. Extensive research is used to evaluate the concept of dependency ratios and to predict the impact on younger and older persons of future economic and demographic growth. This discussion then provides the basis for a review of evolving retirement policies in the three countries. Special attention is given to the way pension plans have been designed, especially early and mandatory retirement policies. An assessment of the adequacy of retirement income follows. The final three chapters are devoted to policy options for the future, given trends in demographic aging. Social scientists and economists will be most interested in this study.
