Critical Explorations of Ageing Bodies and Socio-Gerontechnology

Critical Explorations of Ageing Bodies and Socio-Gerontechnology

The 21st century has been characterised by a proliferation of technologies within our daily lives, including a vast growth in digital devices and information systems of communication. Digital devices and processes of datafication increasingly shape the social worlds of people in later life, particularly as technologies are invested with popular optimism for solving the ‘problems’ of ageing. Technologies have therefore become increasingly immersed into the daily lives of people as they grow older and are significant to the embodied identities, lifestyles and social networks of people in mid-to-later life.

The aim of these two interconnected symposia is to extend and deepen our understandings of the intersection of ageing bodies, digital technologies, algorithms and datafication. In particular, these symposia aim to share ideas and perspectives around ageing, the body and the digital from various disciplines, including Science and Technology Studies (STS), critical age studies, critical data studies and others. The symposia will therefore raise critical questions that might shape a creative and interdisciplinary research agenda.

1. Ageing bodies, materiality, identity and everyday life

Tuesday 17th May 4-6pm GMT

The focus of the first symposium will focus on the underlying assumptions of the ageing body in the co-constitution of ageing and technologies in which the materiality of the body is often taken-for-granted in both design and everyday life and reveals the predominant absent / present nature of the ageing body. This symposium will aim to illuminate interconnections between ageing bodies, social relationships and identities; meanings associated with ageing bodies and the digital; and sociocultural contexts around materiality, objects and things.

Chair: Dr Wendy Martin (Brunel University London)

Speakers: Tiago Moreira (Durham University, UK), Barb Marshall (Trent University, Canada), Michela Cozza (Mälardalen University, Sweden) and Outi Jolanki (Tampere University, Finland)

2. Ageing bodies, datafication and algorithms

Tuesday 24th May 4-6 pm GMT

Participants will seek to illuminate a variety of interrelationships with, and conceptualisations of ageing bodies, as they emerge in everyday entanglements with data infrastructures, AI systems, the data bases that inform machine learning algorithms, and others. Contributions in this symposium explore the many intersections of data infrastructures and ageism, both in the making of algorithms and the everyday encounters with them.

Chair: Alexander Peine (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)

Speakers: Kelly Joyce (Drexel University, USA); Natassia Brenman (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK), Vera Gallistl (University of Vienna, Austria), Juliane Jarke (Bremen University, Germany)