This book focuses on older people as makers of meaning and insight, highlighting the evolving values, priorities and ways of communicating that make later life fascinating. It explores what creating ‘meaning’ in later life really implies, for older people themselves, for how to conceptualise older people and for relationships between generations.
The book offers a language for discussing major types of lifecourse meaning, not least those concerning ethical and temporal aspects of the ways people interpret their lifecourses, the ways older people form part of social and symbolic landscapes, and the types of wisdom they can offer.
It will appeal to students of gerontology, sociological methodology, humanistic sociology, philosophy, psychology, and health promotion and medicine.
Table of Content
Foreword by Rick Moody;
Introduction;
Life Courses, Insight and Meaning;
Diminishing Older People: Silence, Occlusion and ‘Fading’;
Lifetimes, Meaning and Listening to Older People;
Languages for Life-Course Meanings;
Meaning and intergenerationality: approaches by younger people;
Conclusion: Morality, Insight and Wisdom in Life-course Construction.
About the author
Dr Ricca Edmondson is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She carried out research at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin before joining the School of Political Science and Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway, specialising in interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches to life-course meaning, wisdom and their history.
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