The Taking Place of Older Age

November 28th 2023 at 2:30-3:30pm ET

Dr Amy Barron is a Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Manchester. She is interested in age, ageing and the life-course and approaches these themes through ‘non’ or ‘more than representational’ approaches. While Amy’s research to date has focused on older age, she is currently researching middle-age and mid-life, from a life-course perspective. Amy draws on a suite of creative, participatory research methods.

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Representations of older age are often reductive in western societies, portrayed as a distinct period of life characterised by social disengagement and physiological decline. Through rich ethnographic accounts developed with older people from Greater Manchester UK, this paper is concerned with how the category of older age is made through representations,and the different ways people encounter and relate to it. In doing so, it disrupts reductive representations by considering how older age is lived. Dr. Barron responds to calls for the incorporation of more-than representational and affective approaches into the geographic study of older age to advance research on ageing and highlight affect as a useful concept for thinking through difference. The paper is concerned with how older people are represented, with how representations differentially affect and are affected by older individuals, and with how representations of older age are performed and folded into lived accounts. More-than-representational theories offer an understanding of older age that is not pre-given or free-standing, but as something which can emerge, gather and disperse in relation with materialities as well as diffuse atmospheres, affects and emotional resonances.