Aging A-Z

This provocative, intellectually charged treatise serves as a concise introduction to emancipatory gerontology, examining multiple dimensions of persistent and hotly debated topics around aging, the life course, the roles of power, politics and partisanship, culture, economics, and communications. Critical perspectives are presented as definitions for reader understanding, with links to concepts of identity, knowledge construction, social networks, social movements, and inequalities. With today's intensifying concentration of wealth and corporatization, precarity is the fate for growing numbers of the world's population. Intersectionality as an analytic concept offers a new appreciation of how social advantage and disadvantage accumulate, and how constructions of race, ethnicity, class, ability, and gender influence aging. The book's entries offer a bibliographic compendium, crediting the salience of early pioneering theorists and locating these within the cutting-edge of research (social, behavioral, policy, and gene-environment sciences) that currently advances our understandings of human development, trauma, and resilience. Accompanying these foundations are theories of resistance for advancing human rights and the dignity of marginalized populations.

Carroll L. Estes is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) where she founded the Institute for Health & Aging and chaired the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Nursing. Dr Estes is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and past President of three national organizations in aging: The Gerontological Society of America (GSA), the American Society on Aging and the Academy for Gerontology in Higher Education (AGHE). Credited as a founding scholar of the "political economy of aging" and "critical gerontology," Estes has Distinguished Scholar Awards from the American Sociological Association, Pacific Sociological Association., American Public Health Association, American Society on Aging, GSA, and AGHE. Receiving UCSF's highest honor, the UCSF Medal, Estes' awards for public service and action include Sociologists for Women in Society, Justice in Aging, National Organization of Women, Gray Panthers, and honorary Fellowship in the American Academy of Nursing. Nicholas B. DiCarlo, LCSW, writes about aging and social policy at the Institute for Health and Aging, UCSF. He has degrees in Media Studies and Film (B.A.s) from Vassar College and received his Masters of Social Work at Hunter College, specializing in global social work. Writing with Carroll Estes, his critical gerontological work has grown to reflect the ways in which the psychic and social are invariably bound. Nicholas has a private psychotherapy practice in Oakland where he brings this lens on aging, inequality, and generational trauma.

Preface. I. Opening. II. Why Aging A-Z now? III. Critical Concepts. IV. Closing. V. Appendix (Only only)