In long-term care for people with dementia, person-centred care (PCC) is widely promoted as an approach that contributes to the well-being of persons in psycho-geriatric care. The goal of PCC is to acknowledge the personhood of residents and to indicate the responsibility of others to ensure the personhood of persons with dementia. In 2016 and 2018, qualitative empirical research was conducted with the purpose to enhance PCC and meaningful care. Five Dutch nursing homes and a total of eight communities of practice participated in the research project 'People and their Stories'. The aim of this project was to strengthen the hermeneutic competence of care practitioners, with a focus on informal everyday interpersonal interactions between residents and care professionals. This article highlights how care professionals, by enhancing their hermeneutical competence, can do justice to the unique personhood of residents in everyday care practice. Three distinguished features for strengthening the hermeneutic competence of care professionals were formulated: respectful curiosity as a prerequisite, being able to differentiate between fact and meaning, and the awareness of own perspectives and assumptions.

Longevity entails a higher prevalence of chronic impairments that often come with aging, such as age-related vision loss (ARLV). Dependence and increasing vulnerabilities contrast sharply with contemporary reductionist models of positive aging, and gradually worsening eyesight exposes older adults with ARLV to situations where idealized models of late life do not fit them. In analyzing semi-structured interviews conducted in Denmark with 40 older adults, aged 55-70 years, with vision loss, this study examines how people in late midlife and early late life negotiate their vulnerability, dependence, and need for help across different contexts. The findings illustrate how these lived experiences situate people with ARVL outside the idealized late life and how they negotiate their need for help in both their work life and private life. The findings also show how people with age-related vision loss perform a balancing act between the lived vulnerability and the prescribed role of vulnerability arising from social discourses. Some contexts allow people with ARVL to negotiate and re-negotiate their vulnerability, while others, such as work-life contexts, often offer less room for negotiating vulnerability and need for help. The study makes it clear that, given the cultural emphasis on extended work lives, the ways in which work cultures can adapt to age diversity and age-related disabilities must receive more attention.

The productive aging literature describes a wide range of psychosocial benefits of volunteerism for older adults. A growing, compelling body of research drawing from stereotype embodiment theory identifies significant, negative public health impacts of internalized age stereotypes. Yet, little research explores which activities may reduce internalized ageism and enhance psychosocial health as people age. This cross-sectional parallel mediation study examines whether internalized age stereotypes mediate the relationship between volunteering and social connectedness for adults over 50. A convenience sample of volunteers (n = 165) 50+ years of age in the U.S. Mountain West completed an online survey primarily during the COVID-19 pandemic. The independent variable is volunteer hours per week (M = 6.45, SD = 5.38). The dependent variable is social connectedness measured by five positively worded items from the UCLA loneliness scale (M = 4.32, SD = 0.63, and α = 0.86). The indirect effects of five internalized positive (e.g., "wise" and "capable") (M = 4.85, SD = 0.68, α = 0.72) and five negative (e.g., "grumpy" and "helpless") (M = 1.20, SD = 1.02, α = 0.74) age stereotypes were tested. Results (n = 154) indicate that increased internalized positive, but not negative, age stereotypes partially mediate the relationship between volunteer hours and increased social connectedness, while holding constant relevant covariates. Although positive age stereotypes have long been considered a form of ageism, the results of this study suggest that internalizing positive age stereotypes may function as a form of esteem (particularly during the pandemic) to promote enhanced psychosocial health as people age.

The aim of this study was to learn more about the embodied experiences of people over 85 years and to gain a better understanding of how they make sense of the existential issues faced at this unique stage of life. This research is philosophically and methodologically underpinned by existential phenomenology, in particular embodiment theory, which allows exploration of everyday experiences and the personal meanings attributed to them. In-depth interviews with twenty purposively selected individuals were analysed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. Findings indicated that ways of being, relationships with others and one's place in the world continue to evolve into late life. Gerotranscendence theory best encapsulates lived experiences, with salient features including an increased need for deep reflection, positive solitude and meaningful relationships, among other features. This research provides new insights into how identity, meaning and the experience of the broader lifeworld are influenced by corporeal ageing.

Northern China has experienced unprecedented urbanization over the past several decades, with younger Chinese moving to cities while leaving the lion's share of the older population in rural areas. This study explores how this structural change creates unique opportunities and challenges for older adults living in rural houses, which informs their everyday practices, the meanings of homes, and their subsequent housing choices. We examined the housing experiences of rural older adults through a field study conducted in Heilongjiang province. The study employed qualitative in-depth interviews with thirty-two older adults who live or have lived in rural housing, along with systematic documentation of their houses through photography and hand drawings captured from the field. We analyzed the interview narratives and images using the Glaserian grounded theory method to allow a high level of flexibility and conceptualization. The study identified five core categories of residential experiences: (1) houses as sites of production; (2) the earth/dwelling relationship; (3) social life in interstitial spaces; (4) the house as a means to preserve agency in old age and; (5) the burdensome house. These features were directly linked to the older adults' senses of home and their subsequent housing choices. The rural houses offered a strong sense of agency and belonging to rural older adults, but the city's expansion, the changing household registration system, and their aging bodies forced rural older adults to engage in constant reevaluation of their houses, informing their residential choices. We discuss the study's theoretical contributions and offer insights into policies and future planning for residential areas in both rural and urban areas by comparing the spatial configurations of rural dwellings with their urban apartment counterparts.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, a parallel pandemic of ageism is spreading through social media. This paper argues that COVID-19 health securitisation logic and the urgent need to disseminate public health information have allowed nuanced forms of ageism to be reproduced in online forums. I use a critical discourse analysis and social semiotic analysis to deconstruct the use of ageist representations of older adults in COVID-19 memes, which have been organised into four illustrative categories. The analysis attends to ageist representations that both reinforce stereotypical messages and exacerbate intergenerational tensions. Drawing upon moral anthropology, I propose that the memes employ "instrumental ageism," a nuanced form of ageism that advances the health securitisation agenda during the pandemic. The paper concludes with a recognition of the impact of ageist pandemic memes on intergenerational tensions and a call for attention to nuanced forms of ageism in our online and offline social worlds.

As the overall U.S. population grows older and increasingly diverse, greater focus is needed on the various Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS), such as home health care, case management, meal delivery and preparation, and personal care, required to address the unique social and medical complexities of diverse older adults. Presently, however, there has been limited research on needs and broader dynamics associated with HCBS facilitation in this population. To address this gap, we sought to contextualize practices and barriers to care coordination for diverse homebound older adults, conducting semi-structured interviews with 41 providers of HCBS, including older adult care coordinators, in-home care workers, and physicians in greater Chicago, Illinois. Common care coordination practices included fluid processes related to engendering racial concordance in care, facilitating linguistic adaptations, and navigating relationships with clients' families. However, in certain circumstances, these practices are hindered. For example, broad client-level challenges included racialized dynamics of distrust and limited health literacy, and organizations cited ongoing obstacles recruiting and retaining diverse staff and finding HCBS providers to service low-income, minority communities often burdened by high crime rates. Continued efforts need to be made to better understand the HCBS needs of diverse homebound older adults and the associated challenges of providing culturally humble programming to this population.

As an important dimension of lifestyle, participation in leisure activities can enhance people's quality of life. Thus, pursuing an engaged lifestyle has become an assumed requirement of ageing successfully. People's opportunities to pursue an engaged lifestyle are influenced by their social positions, which are defined by their access to economic, cultural, and social capital. However, lifestyles in very old age and the significance of these forms of capital have not been sufficiently investigated. Against this background, we examined the questions of what lifestyles people pursue in very old age, and how these lifestyles are associated with their access to different forms of capital. Representative data from the NRW80+ study in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, were used. The sample comprised 1863 respondents aged 80 and older, and was carried out in 2017. First, the respondents' patterns of participation in leisure activities, which were used to measure their lifestyles, were identified by applying latent class analysis. Second, the associations between lifestyles and indicators of economic, cultural, and social capital were analysed separately for community- and institutional-dwelling very old adults using logistic regression. Three patterns of leisure activity participation were identified: a digital (16.5%), a sociable (41.0%), and a withdrawn (42.4%) lifestyle. For community-dwelling very old adults with low or medium education and those with low occupational prestige in their last job, the odds of having a withdrawn lifestyle were increased. For both community- and institutional-dwelling individuals, larger social networks were associated with decreased odds of pursuing a withdrawn lifestyle. We conclude that the different forms of capital continue to be related to the lifestyle opportunities of very old adults, but lose their importance for institutional-dwelling individuals. A life course perspective on social inequalities in lifestyle is therefore needed.

Across the world, the experiences of women in later life vary enormously, not only along intersectional lines, but also due to cumulative (dis)advantages over an individual's life course. The current study explores how early-life structural (dis)advantages experienced by older African women (particularly experiences related to economic adversity and the social disadvantages that often accompany it) shape their later life experiences and agency. The life stories used in this paper emerged from a larger qualitative study of aging and gender identities in Tanzania based on fifteen (15) in-depth interviews and ten (10) focus group discussions with women 60 to 82 years old. Analyzing the data from an intersectional perspective and life course approach demonstrated that older women's situations area result of the complex interaction of various structural and individual factors, and that timing is crucial for exercising agency. The findings also revealed that as a result of gender norms, the majority of older Tanzanian women were vulnerable to discrimination, poverty, and violence. The norms that promote gender discrimination also limit women's agency and social functioning subject to the constraints imposed. To help protect older women against discrimination and violence, gender-sensitive policies, social programs and legal reforms are critical for speed up the pace of change and foster permanent shifts in harmful gender norms so that aging experiences are no longer all about being a woman.

The oldest old - those aged 80 years and over - are the fastest growing sector of the Australian population and are generally assumed to be at risk of social exclusion which impedes healthy aging. The voices of those thought to be vulnerable to social exclusion are seldom heard. Informed by a critical gerontology framework, socio-ecological model of health and life-course perspectives, this research involved semi-structured in-depth interviews with a purposive sample of 13 people aged 80 and older living alone in government housing, in a socio-economically disadvantaged neighborhood in Melbourne, Australia. Interview transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings reveal a positive picture of survival despite hardship, supportive relationships, a sense of autonomy from living independently, and contributing to society. These findings challenge ageist assumptions, which equate advanced age with social exclusion.

Men's experiences with gendered cancers hinge on at least two axes - their masculinities and their age. This article offers a thematic synthesis of the qualitative research on men living with breast cancer or prostate cancer. This is a qualitative meta-analysis assessing how masculinities and aging may jointly affect men's narratives post-mastectomy or post-prostatectomy. Of particular interest was whether and how aging mediates the experience of these gendered cancers. Reviewed were all qualitative studies published between 2000 and 2020 addressing men's breast cancer and post-mastectomy experiences (N = 15) and men's lives after their prostatectomy (N = 28). The analysis followed the guidelines for thematic synthesis and grounded theory. Free codes of findings were organized into "descriptive" themes, which are then further interpreted to yield "analytical" themes. Seven descriptive themes were identified and these underlie two analytical themes - body talk and resilience. Collectively, men's illness narratives spoke about how cancer challenges their gendered identities and practices, and how they repair identities. The common experience was one of men coming to live with their post-surgical bodies by practicing 'wider,' hybrid forms of masculinities. The principal finding is that men with either type of cancer saw themselves as men and remained seen by others in terms of their gender, not their anatomically changed bodies. Unresolved was the full way aging complemented and mediated the cancer journey.

This study presents a critical gerontological framing analysis of how and why the term "elderly" is presently used in online news media articles in New Zealand, and the potential consequences of such constructions. The article contributes to conceptual debates on aging and later life research by challenging ageist (albeit perhaps subconscious) media practices. Analysis of online news media articles in New Zealand was conducted over an 18-month period before, during and since COVID. Findings revealed that "elderly" was framed as powerless, in predominantly negative (74% of data) stereotypical messages about older adults. The remaining positive stereotypes (26%) used human impact framing. Narratives of "elderly" as vulnerable, declining and a 'burden' may be dependent on several factors, including the media's role in both constructing and reflecting ageist societal attitudes and actions towards older adults. Recommendations are given to support re-framing societal attitudes towards age equality through non-discriminatory, respectful language.

Drawing on interviews, this article analyzes how lesbians, gay men, straight women, and straight men construct positive views of aging during midlife, a life course period when negative perceptions of aging are salient. Interviewees engaged in harnessing progress-a process of crafting personal aging narratives that emphasize growth and improvement-which helped them to feel positively about their own aging. All interviewees shared these progress narratives, but reports differed across gender and sexuality groups. Men's narratives focused on the wisdom they gained and how that made them more relevant to older and younger generations. Regarding the latter, straight men viewed their children as beneficiaries of their progress and gay men viewed younger LGBTQ people as beneficiaries. Women's progress narratives focused on self-improvement. Whereas straight women described becoming more self-reliant with age, lesbians described learning to stand up for themselves. Overall, findings reveal how gender and sexual identities-and the lifelong benefits and burdens that accompany those identities-influence how people create positive perceptions of aging.

Encountering residents living with dementia who come from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds is a common aspect of everyday life in residential care homes. These facilities may have systems of address that differ from those used in residents' respective cultures of origin. Residents' forms of address are elements of identity established in accordance with their life histories. The aim of this article is to investigate empirically the role of address forms for residents and care-providing staff in multilingual residential settings. The findings rely on observational and interactional data as well as interviews. The observational and interactional data includes 23 participants, consisting of five residents and 18 members of care-providing staff. The interviews consist of informal conversations and a corpus based on open-ended interviews with 21 staff members and five residents in two residential homes in Sweden. On the one hand, the findings indicate that addressing the residents with their first name is a prevalent address practice by the staff. They also displayed 20 additional types of address practices. On the other hand, these practices, which are chosen with the best of intentions, often seem to be inconsistent with the residents' preferred address forms. These data lend support to the large body of gerontological literature arguing that sensitivity to the life histories of residents, here the established forms of address, is vital to sustaining their identity.

Aging is not a phenomenon commonly associated with the James Bond franchise, which relies on the successful template of a more agile and youthful hero. While Bond's adversaries used to be older than him (at least in the classic Bond movies of the 1960s and 1970s), with their deficient 'Otherness' underlining the idea that they are 'bad' and impotent patriarchs, more recent Bond films have turned to different age constellations. Even though the films rarely comment on the hero's age or adjust the material to it, there are various ways in which Bond's age is highlighted in these films, depending, for instance, on whether he has to fight 'bad fathers', 'treacherous brothers', or 'disobedient sons'. This article runs the parameter of Bond's age against other parameters like the age of his adversaries and the number of his sexual conquests. It looks into two non-canonical Bond films, Casino Royale (1967) and Never Say Never Again (1983), to demonstrate that the topic of aging has seen more diverse and candid treatments outside of the jurisdiction of the official Eon series. This includes aspects like the hero's virility in the face of old age (at the intersection of senex and eros) and the meta-textual qualities of these films, which resonate with their subtexts on aging. The final section turns to Daniel Craig's swansong as Bond, No Time to Die (2021), which addresses the theme of mortality more directly than any other previous Bond outing.

The Elegies of Maximianus Etruscus (sixth century CE) are first-person narratives in which the poet writes about the life cycle, making love and sex the building blocks of the story. Through his failed relationships with different women, Maximianus talks about the perception of his aging, especially the changes in his body and his eroticism, and the progressive loss of masculinity that to him comes with old age. The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between old age and gender in Maximianus' elegies from a double perspective: the perception of old age itself as a unique and personal fact, and age and masculinity as interacting social constructions that are historically constructed. We will address issues such as the emotions linked to aging, the representation of old age as a living death, the relationship of masculinity with sexuality and the importance of erection. Finally, we will place Maximianus' poems within their historical context, analyzing how they can be interpreted as a metaphor for the period in which its author lived, in which old age and loss of power symbolized the disappearance of the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy and, in general, the end of the Roman Empire. A literary exercise but also a life story, this set of six elegies allows us to approach the social construction of gender and age in Late Antiquity.

Parliamentary representation of persons living with dementia is important because it has the potential to enhance the lives of affected individuals. However, studies that take a closer look at the parliamentarization of dementia are few and far between. Drawing on recent advances in political science representation theory, this paper shows how parliamentary attention to persons living with dementia takes the form of representative claims. An interpretive analysis of 56 parliamentary documents revealed that German parliamentarians voiced what they considered to be the political wants and needs of persons living with dementia in different debates on a broad range of topics. They also created a political presence for persons living with dementia in representative claims about other groups - such as professional carers. Both types of claims were one-dimensional in nature: parliamentarians reduced persons living with dementia to their impairments, rendering them politically visible as vulnerable persons who need to be protected by the same society that their existence is putting a "burden" on. A more multi-dimensional political presence for persons living with dementia is required. In order to improve their dementia representation work, it is important that parliamentarians engage with persons living with dementia and understand how they wish to be engagedin parliament or otherwise.

A culture change movement is taking place in some nursing homes: from the traditional biomedical to more person-centred and relational environments. However, knowledge of the institutional preferences of older people among the general population is limited. We focused on identifying what is important to older people when choosing a nursing home. We also wanted to determine which type of environment (traditional or relational) they would be more inclined to enter; where they would feel better cared for and respected; where professionals would offer more adequate support; where older people would feel more at home, and where they would feel freer to live the life they wanted. A cross-sectional study based on the analysis of two brochures was conducted: one integrated traditional nursing home information, the other included information related to the culture change environment. Participants (n = 71) were first asked, when choosing a nursing home, what the most important features were. They were then asked to consider the two brochures and, after reading each, to assess their desire to enter the nursing home, their feelings about the care given by the professionals, the respect of their personal habits and their choices, the professional support, the home-like atmosphere and freedom to live their life. Finally, they were asked to choose one nursing home. The features cited by the participants were then evaluated by independent evaluators to identify their orientation (traditional or culture change nursing home). The majority was assessed as having a culture change in orientation. After reading the culture change brochure, participants felt more inclined to enter the nursing home, and believed that they would be better cared for, be more respected (habits and choices), and freer to live the life they desired in a home-like atmosphere, compared to the traditional brochure. Finally, most participants chose the culture change nursing home as their final choice. The results support the potential benefits of culture change within nursing home environments.

The lack of constructive cultural narratives of old age impedes older people from giving meaning to any difficult circumstances related to aging in which they might find themselves. In this study, we attempted to shed a different light on experiences of meaning in older age to contribute to sources for constructive counter narratives by gaining insight into (the experience of) meaning in old age of Dutch Franciscan friars. The research was a phenomenological in-depth interview study among twelve friars (mean age 80.6 years) following a reflective lifeworld design. The three main themes that emerged from the analysis were (i) 'brotherhood', illustrating a strong, axiomatic sense of connectedness, (ii) 'finitude', illustrating individual and relational confrontations with daily and existential finitude, and (iii) 'dynamic', illustrating opportunities for new possibilities, personal growth and being able to be receptive of the 'good' in daily life. Our findings showed that aging is a multidimensional process that is not exclusively characterized by decline and loss, but also offers substantial opportunities to experience (new) meaning. Occasionally, meaning seemed to arise as a result of (physical) decline. Our results illustrated that under circumstances of connectedness and togetherness, frailty and dependency do not necessarily form a threat to one's autonomy. Connectedness also showed itself to be a source for authenticity, which reinforced the Franciscans as autonomous moral agents.

Active ageing is a dominant but disputed discourse in the field of ageing. Since it is usually associated with the third age, this article will focus on the active ageing of older adults who need care and services, who are known as the fourth agers. Our data consists of interviews collected from 16 older adults. We analysed the data through content analysis that was guided by the Active Ageing Index (AAI) that is a measuring tool concerning active ageing. According to our results, active ageing during the fourth age can be understood through the lens of small actions and precarity. Although some actions had to be given up or modified, participants were active in various ways, and help from other people and from services was essential. Based on our results, there is a need for further discussion about theorisation and defining active ageing for fourth agers.

In this article, we argue that investigating and learning about agentive abilities of people living with late-stage dementia requires a theoretical framework that focuses on the use of bodily resources in interpersonal interaction (i.e., intercorporeality) for performing joint activities rather than on solely the use of spoken language. Assisted eating, which involves people living with late-stage dementia and professional carers, is taken as an empirical example. The study is based on observations and video recordings of occasions of assisted eating involving five people with late-stage dementia in a residential elder care home; one of these people is used as an example in this paper. The analysis shows that assisted eating is performed as a joint intercorporeal activity. The participants create joint attentional space and a common space of action for their bodily movements when they give and receive food. The participants engaged in the activity coordinate their bodily moves with each other. The analysis (1) demonstrates that the collaboration between people living with late-stage dementia and nurses is based on practical interdependent and co-operative bodily actions. (2) This makes it possible to better understand agency in terms of intercorporeal interaction displayed by people living with late-stage dementia. (3) The agency demonstrated in intercorporeal interaction is thus considered to be shared and distributed across bodies and requires support to be interactionally achieved. (4) The intercorporeal interaction as grounds for agency not only calls on other participants to note and honor the agency of the person with dementia that is still evident in embodied interaction, but also invites others to support people with dementia to claim and display their agency in social interactions and joint activities.

Research has established the importance of understanding the dynamic relationship between older adults and the environments in which they are embedded. However, the meaning of place for unhoused older adults amidst an increasingly contested urban landscape is largely unknown. This exploratory study aims to further include unhoused older adults' experiences in the scholarship on aging and place by asking how unhoused adults over age 50 (1) describe their spatial patterns and experiences and (2) negotiate their relationship with common urban places. Through iterative mapping conducted in focus groups and interviews at Seattle senior centers, respondents identified how they interacted with their communities and environment. Using inductive and deductive coding of both textual and geospatial data, thematic analysis indicated that respondents: (1) experienced confinement to the downtown corridor and expulsion from surrounding areas- a phenomenon compounded by physical and subjective aging; (2) created routines amidst geographic and temporal restrictions to maximize comfort and security; (3) attempted to create residential normalcy in public places through adaptive and accommodative practices; and (4) experienced identities shaped by movement through and access to place. Current social, spatial, and political contexts of city living present many challenges for older unhoused adults. Supports that ignore people's identification with the places that are important to them are unlikely to be successful. Findings from this paper call for service, policy, and design strategies that facilitate personal agency and connection to place among unhoused people midlife and beyond.

This article explores how older Canadian LGBTQ+ persons' gender and sexual identities evolved over time and were influenced by language, role models, and significant others. We draw on data from a qualitative interview study with 30 LGBTQ+ older adults. We analyze our data thematically, finding three overarching themes, namely: a) Lacking language and role models, b) Drawn and pushed out of the closet, and c) Current fluidities and future concerns. Our participants reported that, earlier in life, they had lacked language or positive frameworks with which to make sense of their identities. Upon finding language and role models, all but one eventually came out or transitioned, often after consulting trusted others, experimenting in secret, leading double lives, and/or finding same-sex love. Many were fearful that as they aged, they might once again lose their abilities to openly claim their gender and sexual identities. We discuss our findings in relation to queer theory and the LGBTQ+ aging literature.

It is well recognized that transportation is a barrier to healthcare access for rural-dwelling residents, particularly older adults. Healthcare restructuring initiatives seldom take into consideration the complexity of transportation, which acts as a barrier to appropriate and timely access to healthcare services for older adults in rural communities. This article presents findings of a qualitative research study that explored the complex nature of transportation challenges that rural-dwelling older adults experience in Western Canada when trying to access primary and community care services. Data were derived from a larger study of service user views on a healthcare restructuring initiative intended to facilitate aging-in-place. We conducted 15 focus groups and 9 interviews with a diverse sample of 83 older adults living in one urban centre and nine rural and small rural towns in British Columbia (BC)'s interior. We used content analysis to determine codes and derive themes. Study findings showed that transportation was a top priority for improving primary and community care. Older adult participants identified a range of transportation challenges in trying to get to healthcare services and care providers getting to them. Transportation was a social determinant of health (SDOH) for all participants, regardless of whether they lived in the urban centre or in a rural or small rural town. Our study provides more evidence to support that transportation is a key SDOH for rural-dwelling older adults. As such, transportation should be specifically addressed in healthcare restructuring initiatives that aim to support aging-in-place. Service providers need to advocate for system-wide solutions such as integrating transportation into the healthcare system, while it is imperative that decision-makers act on these solutions.

This paper presents a critique and proposes a reformulation of the concept of subjective age. It questions the nature of 'subjectivity' used in framing the concept and the consequent failure to distinguish between 'subjectivity' and 'self-identity'. I argue that age is not easily framed as a phenomenal (for-me) experience and that it is at least questionable whether aging or agedness possess what might be termed a 'first-person' subjectivity. What is usually referred to as 'subjective age' can be better understood as an aspect of an individual's self-categorisation or self-schema, derived less from its experiential aspect than from its widespread use as an identifier of people's social being - their they-self. Understood as part of a person's self-schema, 'subjective age' is less a subjective than an inter-subjective construct, reflecting one's place in society. Many of the correlates and consequences of 'subjective age' reflect a more general self-evaluation, derived from the network of inter-subjective relations in both system and life world experience, rather than the phenomenal experiences of embodied age. Integrating research on self-categorisation and social identity with 'self-perceived' age offers a clearer conceptual base from which to study subjective age, leaving the thornier question of the subjectivity of age to students of aging in the humanities and human sciences.

Negative messages about aging dominate public discourse about the COVID-19 pandemic as older adults have been classified as members of a "vulnerable" population due to their chronological age. To explore young adults' feelings about aging before and after the emergence of COVID-19, we collected 794 qualitative questionnaires during the fall of 2017 and another 463 responses during the fall of 2020. We drew on the concepts of age-based stereotypes and future selves to guide our thematic analysis of the data. Findings captured young adults' feelings about aging at two distinct points in time and demonstrate the complex ways the communication contributed to shifting feelings about aging. In doing so, we highlight the role that portrayals of aging play in shaping young adults' feelings about aging and their perception of their future selves. These findings offer conceptual contributions about communication, context, and aging.

Receiving a dementia diagnosis is a difficult experience for most people and often affects their wellbeing negatively. To support people's wellbeing, in a therapeutic context, life-storytelling, reminiscence and mindfulness are used with people with dementia. In an everyday context, traditional games are used as a resource for stimulating memory, cognition and social activity. While an increasing number of creative strategies are available to support people with dementia, the area of board games design and their effect on wellbeing is underexplored. This paper reports on the evaluation of the This is Me (TIM) mindful life-storytelling board game by the European project MinD. Using a co-design methodology, TIM was developed with and for people with mild to moderate dementia to support their wellbeing by enhancing self-empowerment and social engagement. A focus group methodology was used to evaluate TIM with 50 people with dementia and 19 carers across four countries. TIM was evaluated with regard to the usability and experience of the design as well as people's emotional wellbeing, social engagement and agency. The thematic analysis demonstrated that the combination of life-storytelling and mindfulness allowed players to engage in meaningful social interaction and, as a result, they reported enjoyment, learning, more acceptance of the past and present situation, and that they perceived looking forward into the future together with others as helpful. The study demonstrates that design can be a useful means to support people with dementia in aspects of emotional wellbeing, social engagement and a sense of agency.