Aging as Adaptation

In traditional gerontological terms, adaptation is usually understood as the production of physical aids to mitigate the impairment effects caused by age-related disabilities, or as those alterations organizations need to make under the concept of reasonable adjustment to prevent age discrimination (in the UK, e.g., age has been a protected characteristic under the Equality Act since 2010). This article will be the first to examine aging in relation to theories of adaptation within cultural studies and the humanities. It is thus an interdisciplinary intervention within the field of cultural gerontology and cultural theories of adaptation. Adaptation studies in cultural studies and the humanities have moved away from fidelity criticism (the issue of how faithful an adaptation is to its original) toward thinking of adaptation as a creative, improvisational space. We ask if theories of adaptation as understood within cultural studies and the humanities can help us develop a more productive and creative way of conceptualizing the aging process, which reframes aging in terms of transformational and collaborative adaptation. Moreover, for women in particular, this process of adaptation involves engagement with ideas of women's experience that encompass an adaptive, intergenerational understanding of feminism. Our article draws on interviews with the producer and scriptwriter of the Representage theater group's play My Turn Now. The script for the play is adapted from a 1993 coauthored book written by a group of 6 women who were then in their 60s and 70s, who founded a networking group for older women.

Representations of the National Health Service (NHS) in UK print media

Generating negative news coverage of state welfare provision has been identified as a strategy designed to create public support for radical policies aimed to reduce such provision. To date, research of this kind has focused on scandals and crises. However, little is known about the complex relationship between media representations of specific events, and those of media representations in the lead up to these events, what we refer to as periphery representations. Employing a content and frame analysis, this paper analyses the frequency and intensity of peripheral representations of the National Health Service (NHS) in the British print media for 1 week a month before and for 1 week during three key events in recent NHS history: the official consultation period for the Health and Social Care Act; the publication of Five-Year Forward View, and the first Junior Doctor Strike. This article finds that negative NHS representations in articles that are peripheral to particular topical issues of controversy evidence fluctuations, amplifications and intensities across time periods, depending on the particular context. The paper concludes by arguing that repetition of negative themes in news helps to build a sensibility of 'inadequacy' of vital services. We hope that this focus on the ways in which amplifications and de-amplifications in negative intensity of peripheral NHS representations across time and content, helps to contribute to debate about the complex interplay between public health services, media representation and policy consent.

Reduced to curtain twitchers? Age, ageism and the careers of four women actors

Cultural gerontology has developed critical work around cultural representations of age and aging and their role in the reproduction of ageism. However, the cultural industries as producers and disseminators of representations remain under researched. This paper draws on a focus group with four older women actors to argue that workforce allocation and assumptions about audience demographics intersect with cultural attitudes around women's aging to impact on older women actors' career opportunities. We argue that ageism within the cultural industries is limiting our ability to develop diverse and non-ageist cultural representation of women's aging.

Making death 'good': instructional tales for dying in newspaper accounts of Jade Goody's death

Facilitating a 'good' death is a central goal for hospices and palliative care organisations. The key features of such a death include an acceptance of death, an open awareness of and communication about death, the settling of practical and interpersonal business, the reduction of suffering and pain, and the enhancement of autonomy, choice and control. Yet deaths are inherently neither good nor bad; they require cultural labour to be 'made over' as good. Drawing on media accounts of the controversial death of UK reality television star Jade Goody, and building on existing analyses of her death, we examine how cultural discourses actively work to construct deaths as good or bad and to position the dying and those witnessing their death as morally accountable. By constructing Goody as bravely breaking social taboos by openly acknowledging death, by contextualising her dying as occurring at the end of a life well lived and by emphasising biographical continuity and agency, newspaper accounts serve to position themselves as educative rather than exploitative, and readers as information-seekers rather than ghoulishly voyeuristic. We argue that popular culture offers moral instruction in dying well which resonates with the messages from palliative care.

The self-control ethos and the ‘chav’: Unpacking cultural representations of the white working class

This paper applies Joffe and Staerklé’s self-control ethos to cultural representations of the white working class. We initially follow their identification of three aspects of the self-control ethos — mind, body, and destiny — to show the explanatory value of the concept, before considering four possible avenues through which the self-control ethos may be developed: the extent to which it is the interrelationship between the separate aspects of the self-control ethos which lends them their visceral, emotional, and symbolic power; that gender differentiation is an important element in the specific content of stereotypes; that some stereotype content relates to issues of containment; and that a tighter contextualization is afforded to the self-control ethos by considering self and other relations in the terms of a consumer culture. These are offered as possible directions for the future development of a social representational approach sensitive to the contemporary cultural context.

Making a difference: ethical consumption and the everyday

Our everyday shopping practices are increasingly marketed as opportunities to 'make a difference' via our ethical consumption choices. In response to a growing body of work detailing the ways in which specific alignments of 'ethics' and 'consumption' are mediated, we explore how 'ethical' opportunities such as the consumption of Fairtrade products are recognized, experienced and taken-up in the everyday. The 'everyday' is approached here via a specially commissioned Mass Observation directive, a volunteer panel of correspondents in the UK. Our on-going thematic analysis of their autobiographical accounts aims to explore a complex unevenness in the ways 'ordinary' people experience and negotiate calls to enact their ethical agency through consumption. Situating ethical consumption, moral obligation and choice in the everyday is, we argue, important if we are to avoid both over-exaggerating the reflexive and self-conscious sensibilities involved in ethical consumption, and, adhering to a reductive understanding of ethical self-expression.