From Legacies to Futures
Older adults want to exercise a sense of control over their relationships, structures and surroundings as they navigate the later life course. Through detailed ethnographic case studies, this book examines the dynamic lifeworlds of a hundred and seven community-dwelling older adults in Europe before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores the importance of agency, the frictions between self-perceptions of age and outside impositions and the need to deconstruct old age as a homogenising category. These insights challenge simple narratives of older persons as social burdens by highlighting the complex roles they fill in family, neighbourhood and communities.
Katja Seidel is a Senior Lecturer at the Unit for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Innsbruck and co-Director of the ‘ethnocineca – International Documentary Film Festival’ in Vienna. She has conducted fieldwork in Argentina, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Spain and Germany, and co-directed the Holocaust research project ‘A Letter to the Stars’ in Vienna.