Valuing older people: A humanist approach to ageing

Description

How can we understand older people as real human beings, value their wisdom, and appreciate that their norms and purposes both matter in themselves and are affected by those of others? Using a life-course approach this book argues that the complexity and potential creativity of later life demand a humanistic vision of older people and ageing.

Ricca Edmondson was educated in Lancaster and Oxford. After research at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, she is now senior lecturer in the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her teaching and research focus on the sociology of wisdom and the life course, ethnographic methods, intercultural understanding, rhetorical argument and the history of political thought.Hans-Joachim von Kondratowitz was educated in Berlin, Saarbrucken and Washington University, before working in Munich and Kassel. He is now a senior researcher at the German Centre of Gerontology in Berlin. His interests include international long-term care arrangements, older people and family migration, welfare state and welfare cultures, cultural definitions of ageing, and community projects on ageing.

"An eagerly awaited volume that directs attention to norms and values as essential for capacities to age creatively and give meaning to the process of ageing." Lars Andersson, National Institute for the Study of Ageing and Later Life (NISAL), Linkoping University, Sweden "This book not only reflects the growing maturity of humanistic gerontology, but invites all of us to reflect more deeply on the very meaning of 'maturity' itself. It is a remarkable collection, drawn from all over the globe, of the best thinking on what it means to grow older." Harry R. Moody, Director of Academic Affairs, AARP