CfP: Aging from beyond the skin


Deadline for manuscript submission: September 20th, 2017
Send manuscripts and inquiries to compaso@compaso.eu

For the Winter 2017 issue, we invite research articles and notes that explore how we are being aged from outside the contours of our bodies, through the presence and absence of interaction with others, in materially and technologically organized activities, by living in mediated worlds and incorporating mediated voices into ourselves. We invite authors to reflect on the significance of media, discourses, material shapes and technologies for the form, intensity and diversity of ageing, addressing questions such as the following:

• What forms of ageing are portrayed in children stories, films, textbooks, commercials, comics, and the thick environment of images and narratives in which we are immersed [1], [2]?
• How do people age through gameplay? How are elderly characters included and animated in gameworlds, and how are elderly players imagined through game design [3], [4]?
• How can one do age through clothing and body work [5]–[7]?
• How do people learn to age as women and men? What are the old and new forms of the double standard of ageing across different media [8], [9]?
• How do people age through scientific representations, models and methods? How does social and psychological sciences re-create age categories, influence and strength and how is it re-produced through public communication (Bodily 1994; Rughiniș and Humă 2015; Vincent 2008; Vincent, Tulle, and Bond 2008)?
• How do new technologies shape old age and ageing – through inequalities of access and use, dis/empowerment in relations with the environment, new communities and self-images [14]–[17]?


References
[1] D. G. Bazzini, W. D. McIntosh, S. M. Smith, S. Cook, and C. Harris, “The aging woman in popular film: Underrepresented, unattractive, unfriendly, and unintelligent,” Sex Roles, vol. 36, no. 7–8, pp. 531–543, Apr. 1997.
[2] T. Robinson, M. Callister, and D. Magoffin, “Older Characters in Teen Movies from 1980–2006,” http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03601270802708426, 2009.
[3] S. M. Iversen, “Play and Productivity: The Constitution of Ageing Adults in Research on Digital Games,” Games Cult., vol. 11, no. 1–2, pp. 7–27, Jan. 2016.
[4] C. Rughiniș, E. Toma, and R. Rughiniș, “Time to Reminisce and Die: Representing Old Age in Art Games,” in Conference of the Digital Games Research Associagion - DiGRA 2015, 2015, pp. 1–12.
[5] C. Laz, “Act Your Age,” Sociol. Forum, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 85–113, 1998.
[6] J. Twigg, “Clothing, age and the body: a critical review,” Ageing Soc., vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 285–305, Mar. 2007.
[7] J. Twigg, “The body, gender, and age: Feminist insights in social gerontology,” J. Aging Stud., vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 59–73, 2004.
[8] S. Sontag, “The Double Standard of Ageing,” The Saturday Review, pp. 29–38, 23-Sep-1972.
[9] M. M. Lauzen and D. M. Dozier, “Maintaining the Double Standard: Portrayals of Age and Gender in Popular Films,” Sex Roles, vol. 52, no. 7–8, pp. 437–446, Apr. 2005.
[10] C. Bodily, “Ageism and the deployments of ‘age’. A constructionist view,” in Constructing the Social, T. R. Sarbin and J. I. Kitsuse, Eds. Sage Publications, 1994, pp. 174–194.
[11] C. Rughiniș and B. Humă, “Who theorizes age? The ‘socio-demographic variables’ device and age–period–cohort analysis in the rhetoric of survey research,” J. Aging Stud., vol. 35, pp. 144–159, Dec. 2015.
[12] J. A. Vincent, “The cultural construction old age as a biological phenomenon: Science and anti-ageing technologies,” J. Aging Stud., vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 331–339, Dec. 2008.
[13] J. A. Vincent, E. Tulle, and J. Bond, “The anti-ageing enterprise: Science, knowledge, expertise, rhetoric and values,” J. Aging Stud., vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 291–294, Dec. 2008.
[14] R. P. Yu, N. B. Ellison, R. J. McCammon, and K. M. Langa, “Mapping the two levels of digital divide: Internet access and social network site adoption among older adults in the USA,” Information, Commun. Soc., vol. 19, no. 10, pp. 1445–1464, Oct. 2016.
[15] T. N. Friemel, “The digital divide has grown old: Determinants of a digital divide among seniors,” New Media Soc., vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 313–331, Feb. 2016.
[16] Y.-R. R. Chen and P. J. Schulz, “The Effect of Information Communication Technology Interventions on Reducing Social Isolation in the Elderly: A Systematic Review.,” J. Med. Internet Res., vol. 18, no. 1, p. e18, Jan. 2016.
[17] S. Yusif, J. Soar, and A. Hafeez-Baig, “Older people, assistive technologies, and the barriers to adoption: A systematic review,” Int. J. Med. Inform., vol. 94, pp. 112–116, 2016.