Growing Up and Growing Older

Module code: SY3096

Age creates a framework for many of our social structures, and the process of ageing itself can affect how individuals navigate society and various social groups. What place do older individuals have in different cultures and societies? How and why are these changing over time?

You’ll be sifting through the arguments surrounding ageing and looking at the course of life and death. Cultural, religious, economic and gender factors can all influence the ageing process, and you’ll be investigating to what extent they do.

The attitudes society has towards death and the dying will also be important, as well as people’s attitudes towards it. There are many instances in which the elderly are vulnerable, experience poverty and other risks that are involved with ageing. You’ll be critically analysing these dilemmas, and how our society often enables these risks, as well as how we can prevent them.

Topics covered

• What is age and why does it matter?
• Conceptualising age – birthdays, laws, the body, life course, material objects
• Relational understandings of age: Generations, cohorts and Intergenerationality
• Childhood and youth in history and across the globe
• Youth participation
• Childhood in crisis/Youth at risk
• Youth cultures
• Youth transitions
• Alternative transitions, Stuck in transition or transitionless lives
• University as a place of transition
• Mobility and immobility in transitions to adulthood
• Middle age
• Old age
• Death and dying