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Distributed for University of British Columbia Press

The Aging–Disability Nexus

As the global population ages, disability demographics are shifting. Societal change and global health inequities have changed who is likely to live to old age and who is likely to live with disability in a variety of sociocultural and geopolitical contexts. One thing is clear: aging is a pressing issue across the Western world and will become more so in the years ahead. The Aging–Disability Nexus breaks new ground by bringing gerontology and disability studies into dialogue with each other. This thoughtful examination of competing narratives about aging and disability employs a variety of empirical, conceptual, and pedagogical approaches. Contributors explore the tensions that shape how disability and aging are understood, experienced, and responded to at both individual and systemic levels, while avoiding the common tendency to conflate these overlapping elements and map them onto a normative, faulty notion of the human life.

Table of Contents

Introduction / Katie Aubrecht, Christine Kelly, and Carla Rice
Part 1: Conceptualizing the Nexus
1 Aging and Disability: The Paradoxical Positions of the Chronological Life Course / Amanda Grenier, Meridith Griffin, and Colleen McGrath
2 Spectres of Unproductive Life: The Aging/Disability/Dementia Complex / Lucy Burke
3 Cripping Care Advice: Austerity, Advice Literature, and the Troubled Link between Disability and Old Age / Sally Chivers
4 Dancing In and Out of Control / Monique Lanoix
Part 2: Politics of Care
5 Aging with Disability, Aging into Disability, and Long-Term Care Policy: Toward a Critical Ethics of Care Approach / Maggie FitzGerald
6 Direct Funded Home Care for Older Adults: Exploring the Legacies of Disability Activism / Christine Kelly
7 Age, Disability, and Encounters with Care: Older People’s Experiences of Home Care / Rachel Barken and Alan Santinele Martino
8 Reflections on Power and Agency while Aging with and into Cognitive Impairment: Two Women’s Stories / Margaret Oldfield and Nancy Hansen
9 Regulation of “Care” in Long-term Care Homes in Ontario, Canada / Poland Lai
Part 3: Timescapes and Landscapes
10 Aging with and into Disability: Futurities of New Materialisms / Nadine Changfoot and Carla Rice
11 From “Boomer” to “Zoomer”: Exploring Cultural Understandings of Aging with Vitality under Neoliberal Capitalism / Anne McGuire
12 Deconstructing Dependency and Development in Global Dementia Policy / Katie Aubrecht and Akwasi Boafo
13 Aging and Disability in the Time of AIDS: Reflections from Community-Based Research with Older Women Caregivers in South Africa / May Chazan
14 Disability, Age, the British Countryside and Social Exclusio

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