Understanding the vital emergence and expression of aging: How matter comes to matter in gerontology's posthumanist turn

An 'all-world ageing' perspective and its wider ethics of care: An empirical illustration

Recent commentaries have proposed 'all-world ageing' as a new perspective for social scientific ageing research. It is based on the theoretical observation that the ageing process involves all forms of entities co-ageing relationally with each other, and with their surrounds. Its disciplinary implications hence being that what we categorize as ageing in social scientific ageing research should not be limited to human bodies, and that ageing non-humans should be brought under its purview. To empirically illustrate these theoretical and disciplinary assertions, and explore their implications, the current paper reports a study of how people co-age with non-humans they interact with in their daily lives. Sixteen people aged 66-90 were interviewed, ten of them also being observed at those times. The findings show some intricate and diverse relations that involve their co-ageing with varied biological entities and nature surrounds (such as plants, domestic animals and green spaces) and varied non-biological entities and non-nature surrounds (such as materials, technologies, accommodations, organizations and infrastructures). Meanwhile, important crosscutting themes - including lifespan, function and aesthetics - emerge as objectives of care, valued and exercised in broad terms. This empirical reconnaissance shows the potential for an all-world ageing perspective to engage diverse societal challenges and inform diverse areas of practice as part of a wider ethics of care. From it, a number of important considerations and undertakings arise for future scholarship.

'Becoming restrained': Conceptualising restrictive practices in the care of people living with dementia in acute hospital settings

The use of restrictive practices within health and social care has attracted policy and practice attention, predominantly focusing on children and young people with mental health conditions, learning disabilities and autism. However, despite growing appreciation of the need to improve care quality for people living with dementia (PLWD), the potentially routine use of restrictive practices in their care has received little attention. PLWD are at significant risk of experiencing restrictive practices during unscheduled acute hospital admissions. In everyday routine hospital care of PLWD, concerns about subtle and less visible forms of restrictive practices and their impacts remain. This article draws on Deleuze's concepts of 'assemblage' and 'event' to conceptualise restrictive practices as institutional, interconnection social and political attitudes and organisational cultural practices. We argue that this approach illuminates the diverse ways restrictive practices are used, legitimatised and perpetuated in the care of PLWD. We examine restrictive practices in acute care contexts, understanding their use requires examining the wider socio-political, organisational cultures and professional practice contexts in which clinical practices occurs. Whereas 'events' and 'assemblages' have predominantly been used to examine embodied entanglements in diverse health contexts, examining restrictive practices as a structural assemblage extends the application of this theoretical framework.

Cognitivism ageing: The Alzheimer conundrum as switched ontology & the potential for a new materialist dementia

Following recent regulatory approvals for anti-Alzheimer's monoclonal antibodies, this paper considers the contemporary role of cognitivism in defining the ontological commitments of dementia research, as well as movements away from cognitivism under the umbrella of 4E cognitive science. 4E cognitive theories, extending cognition into bodies, their environs, and active relations between the two, share potentially fruitful affinities with new materialisms which focus on the co-constitution of matter in intra-action. These semi-overlapping conceptual positions furnish some opportunity for an ontological alternative to longstanding cognitivist commitments, particularly to the isolated brain as a material catalyst for commercial interventions. After outlining mainstream cognitivism and its shortcomings, I explore 4E and new materialism as possibly transformative conceptual schemas for dementia research, a field for which cognitivist imaginings of cognitive decline in later life have profound and often regrettable ramifications. To realise this new materialist dementia, I sketch out a cognitive ontology based on Barad's agential realism. This facilitates a reassessment of the biggest conundrum in dementia research - the lack of neat correlation between (apparently material) neuropathology and (apparently immaterial) cognitive impairment - alongside the continued failure of efforts to develop effective interventions. It also gives social researchers working on cognitive decline in later life an opportunity to reappraise the nature of social science as a response to such phenomena. If cognition and cognitive ageing are reimagined as an emergent characteristic of intra-acting matter, then new materialist social science might be at least as conducive to salutogenic interventions as the neuropsychiatric technoscience that dominates the contemporary dementia research economy despite continual failures. I argue that a new materialist cognitive ontology could help us think beyond an ageing cognitivism and, by extension, beyond the Alzheimer conundrum.

Doing digital exclusion - technology practices of older internet non-users

Gerontological literature has widely explored barriers to technology use in later life, often drawing upon binary conceptualizations of "using" and "not using" a certain technological device. However, such concepts have been increasingly up for debate. Using a praxeological approach, this study aims to explore technology use and non-use in later life not as dichotomous counterparts, but as routine experiences that take place in the everyday lives of older adults, asking: Which technology practices that go beyond using and not using a certain device can be found in the everyday lives of older non-users? How are these practices related to experiences of age and aging? The paper draws upon data from 15 semi-structured interviews with older adults (65+) in Austria, who self-identify as 'non-users' of digital technologies. Data was analyzed using thematic coding (Flick, 2016) and revealed that while interviewees saw themselves as "non-users" of digital technologies, they all regularly engaged with digital technologies in their daily lives. These manifold everyday engagements with digital technologies can be summarized as four bundles of technology practices: (1) avoidance practices, (2) usage practices, (3) appropriation practices, and (4) subjectivation practices. Non-users regularly engaged in and transitioned between these practice bundles. Not using digital technologies therefore emerged as an ambivalent, everyday experience, rather than an actual practice pattern that can be measured using binary categories of 'use' and 'non-use'. By understanding the use and non-use of digital technologies in later life not as binary counterparts, but as an active process of doing, this paper highlights how the use and non-use of digital technologies is not a rational decision, but rather an ensemble of avoidance, usage, and appropriation practices that older adults experience and negotiate in their everyday lives. This paper therefore suggests moving away from technology use and non-use as central concepts for studying technology in later life, and instead questioning which practices are valued as a 'right' or 'real' way of using digital technologies, and which are devalued as 'wrong' usage.

Aging well in the community: Understanding the complexities of older people's dial-a-ride bus journeys

Older peoples' independent living in their own homes and their ability to move around and maintain social relations in their communities have been acknowledged as important aims to support their well-being. In this article, we study Special Transport Services as a means to support older persons with 'aging in place' - that is, within their communities. From "go-alongs" (shared dial-a-ride bus journeys) and "sit-down interviews" (at participant's home or a café) with 12 older people living in a Finnish suburb, we explored their everyday dial-a-ride bus trips to the local mall. We used actor-network theory and the concept of motility to show how at first glance what appeared to be simple dial-a-ride journeys were in fact produced by a complex and fluid actor network consisting of people, rules, norms, practices, technical devices, as well as other objects and tools. Associations between various human and non-human actors compensated for the functional limitations experienced by the participants, but also created difficulties during the journeys. Our main finding is that the actor network of dial-a-ride bus did physically help older people be more mobile, but at the same time the service required a wide range of know-how and skills. We argue that developing a truly age-friendly environment - with inclusive services to help older individuals age well within their community - requires a detailed understanding from their perspective of the actor networks that produce those services. When planning old age services, there is a need to engage with older people from different social backgrounds to develop services that are genuinely supportive and easy to use for a heterogeneous group. Our findings can be utilized in developing physical and social environments that better support older people's mobility and enable them to age well in the community.

'Whole onflow', the productive event: an articulation through health

In this paper we develop an understanding of 'whole onflow'. Extending philosopher Ralph Pred's original descriptions in materialist directions consistent with posthumanist and non-representational theory, we treat whole onflow as the progressing moment ever-materializing; as a never-ending more-than-human event happening everywhere that is existed in, registered, malleable and productive. In particular, using examples in health, we describe whole onflow's core qualities that lend it, as a vital forceful becoming, its productive capacities. We argue that whole onflow offers compelling ways of understanding the processual origins of health and many productions besides in all their diversity. Moreover, we argue that it offers ways of understanding how humans figure as part of the Universe's becoming.

The co-constitution of ageing and technology – a model and agenda

This paper presents a model for studying ageing and technology. It investigates the theoretical gains that can be made by combining insights from Age Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Although technology has become a much more salient part in the everyday lives of older people and investments are high in technologies to deal with the alleged challenges of demographic change, theory development about ageing–technology relations has not kept up with these trends. Partly this is due to the poor connection between the social scientific understanding of ageing and the technically focused discipline of gerontechnology. This has led to an interventionist logic that underlies much of the current and implicit theorising about ageing and technology. We briefly analyse the problems of the interventionist logic and then present a model that conceptualises ageing and technology as co-constituted. We propose this model – which we call the CAT-model – to highlight a number of fundamental ideas about ageing–technology relations. At the centre are four different arenas (life-worlds of older people, design worlds, technological artefacts and images of ageing) in and across which these relations can and should be studied. To develop the model, we build on our own theoretical and empirical work over the last decade, and on examples from recent scholarship that straddle the disciplinary boundaries between STS and Age Studies.