“It’s a long long road that ends at the horizon, and there it continues…. You don’t know if something is there…it is different there from what you know and it changes, you know, the … colors change, it’s really an adventure, but you have to keep moving.” The artwork is by Gerard V, a research collaborator at Christine Verbruggen’s project.

EASA Network

Age and Generations Network

AGENET

This network brings together social anthropologists engaged in research, teaching, and applied work involving older adults, multi/inter-generational relationships, and life-course perspectives. The impetus to form the group was the need to enhance the presence of anthropology in research on ageing, generation and the life course. Issues around ageing, generation and the life course are increasingly influencing not only the fabrics of social relations, social policies, and health, but also emerging issues in areas like migration, new technology and climate change. The ability to understand these global transformations requires the kind of holistic, comparative, empirically grounded theory that anthropology excels at. In placing age and generations at the center of analyses of social life, our work reconsiders the diversity of roles people of all ages occupy; the different forms of agency and political power they wield; the intersections of age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and socio-economic positioning across the life course; the changing and multiple social roles of elders within families and other social groups and communities spanning across and between different societies.

Aims

The network will encourage exchange and collaboration through joint research projects, conferences and publications on topics of ageing, generation and the life course
The Network will develop and share resources on research methods, ethics, theory, and teaching to create a robust knowledge base that could form the basis of a key text and/or educational curricula
The network will explore opportunities to work with other EASA networks (Children and Youth Network, Medical Anthropology Network, Anthropology and Mobility Network, Applied Anthropology e.g.) to find bridging concepts that can have greater impact within social anthropology
The Network will encourage knowledge exchange opportunities to work with non-academic partners (community groups, health and care providers, human rights organizations, schools, e.g.)
The Network will encourage students and emerging scholars to pursue topics in ageing and life course research