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This book is about older women’s strength, freedom, tenacity, determination, resilience, independence, social and political involvement and, in particular, it is about re-imagining ageing. Older women represent the great majority of older people. The book describes instances of age and gender discrimination and examples of social inclusion and protagonism of older women in Europe. It solicits a change in perspective, focusing on the necessary societal changes to make space to older people and older women in particular. How is society going to address age and gender discrimination in social and institutional settings? How should work settings change to effectively make space to older worker...
The different traditions that have inspired the contributors to this volume can be divided along three different orientations, one that is rooted predominantly in sociolinguistics, a second that is ethnomethodologically informed, and a third that came in the wake of narrative interview research. All three share a commitment to view self and identity not as essential properties of the person but as constituted in discursive practices and particularly in narrative. Moreover, since self and identity are held to be phenomena that are contextually and continually generated, they are defined and viewed in the plural, as selves and identities. In the attempt of moving closer toward a process-oriented approach to the formation of selves and identities, this volume sets the stage for future discussions of the role of narrative and discourse in this generation process and for how a close analysis of these processes can advance an understanding of the world around us and within this world, of identities and selves.
The United States faces a growing crisis in care. The number of people needing care is growing while the ranks of traditional caregivers have shrunk. The status of care workers is a critical concern. Evelyn Nakano Glenn offers an innovative interpretation of care labor in the United States by tracing the roots of inequity along two interconnected strands: unpaid caring within the family; and slavery, indenture, and other forms of coerced labor. By bringing both into the same analytic framework, she provides a convincing explanation of the devaluation of care work and the exclusion of both unpaid and paid care workers from critical rights such as minimum wage, retirement benefits, and workers...
This critical study explores late twentieth century novels by women writers--including Doris Lessing, May Sarton and Barbara Pym--that feature female protagonists over the age of sixty. These novels' discourses on aging contrast with those largely pejorative ones that dominate Western society. They break the silence that normally surrounds the lives of the aged, and this book investigates how older female protagonists are represented in relation to areas such as sexuality, dependence and everyday life. Beginning with an investigation of popular opinions about aging and a survey of hypotheses from disciplines including gerontology, psychology and feminism, the text reviews literary critical a...
Loretta Baldassar is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Western Australia. --
This book explores how neoliberalism and austerity have affected older people living within a deindustrialised town, utilising a Foucauldian approach and an ethnographic methodology. It seeks to bridge the gap between high sociological theory and a research focus upon older people. The link between the micro (real people, within a real place) and macro (abstract processes) is examined, and a mid-range theory of change is innovatively developed to highlight how older people are having to negotiate national transformations at the everyday level. Key themes within this book include the recreation of human subjectivity, antiwelfarism, the stigmatisation and exclusion of the poor, the fragmentati...
In Being an Older Woman: A Study in the Social Production of Identity, Isabella Paoletti examines how older women's identities are socially constructed and, in particular, how they can be influenced by institutional intervention. The interest in identity production is not only theoretical, but also practical. Different perceptions of oneself as an older woman involve considerable differences in the definition of the person's possible sphere of action, and therefore, in her life perspective. Based on the experiences of Italian women who participated in the European Older Women's Project, this study explores how gender and age identities are interactionally constructed in specific institutional contexts. Being an Older Woman describes the discourse and social practices that constitute older women's identities, helping to identify and deconstruct those stereotypes that tend to produce marginalization of older people. As a resource for scholars in discourse, gender studies, aging and gerontology, this volume gives new perspectives on the construction of perceptions of older women as well as contributing images of them as active, lively, and appealing human beings.
Written by leading researchers from four continents, this book offers a broad and contemporary assessment of the ways in which gender affects workplace communication and how this in turn influences people’s choices, training, opportunities and career development. A range of work situations are considered (including communication within the normal routine, in a crisis or under pressure, and during those occasions important for career development) and examples are sourced from a variety of contexts (including international business, leadership, service work, and computer-mediated communication). Gender and Communication at Work includes a diversity of theoretical perspectives in order to most successfully map the range of communication strategies, identities and roles which impact upon and are influenced by gender at work.
Methodological accounts of research interviews find that how researchers use this tool in their work varies widely: there are many “ways” of interviewing. This edited collection unpacks the interactional dynamics of qualitative research interviews from studies conducted in education, second language acquisition, applied linguistics and disability studies from scholars in the UK, USA, Italy, Portugal and Korea. These studies explore the interactional details of how the identities of researchers and their participants matter for the generation of interview data, as well as the kinds of discursive resources and social actions that occur in tandem with the production of data for research projects. Given the widespread use of qualitative interviews for social research, this book provides a robust contribution to what Tim Rapley has called the “social studies of interviewing.” This book is relevant to audiences across disciplines who use the interview as a primary research method.
Pragmatics of society takes a socio-cultural perspective on pragmatics and gives a broad view of how social and cultural factors influence language use. The volume covers a wide range of topics within the field of sociopragmatics. This subfield of pragmatics encompasses sociolinguistic studies that focus on how pragmatic and discourse features vary according to macro-sociological variables such as age, gender, class and region (variational pragmatics), and discourse/conversation analytical studies investigating variation according to the activity engaged in by the participants and the identities displayed as relevant in interaction. The volume also covers studies in linguistic pragmatics with a more general socio-cultural focus, including global and intercultural communication, politeness, critical discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Each article presents the state-of-the-art of the topic at hand, as well as new research.