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Wives at 12, Mothers by 13 #InternationalWomensDay
by Sarah Harper In recognition of International Women’s Day 2018 we highlight the plight of millions of women across the world still trapped in oppressive demographic regimes, which frame ...
Challenging ageism: time for a Convention on the rights of older people?
by Mark Gorman This year marks a major milestone. It was seventy years ago that the United Nations first agreed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its commitment to the idea that, i...
Longitudinal Perspectives on Ageing
Theodore D Cosco Longitudinal research methods have been a staple of gerontological research, providing myriad insights into the processes of ageing and the mechanisms that underpin the heterog...
When will we develop global products to support older people?
About the Author Jeremy Myerson holds the Helen Hamlyn Chair of Design at the Royal College of Art and is a Visiting Fellow, Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, University of Oxford Desp...
“Killing the Angel in the House”: from female suffrage to sex discrimination
It took such an effort to open the door, and now we walk through it without a backward glance – or don’t walk through it at all. That’s the tragedy, that some of us don’t us...
Is grandparenting good for you?
One of the most common roles that older people have around the world is being a grandparent. From Europe to US, from South America to Asia, grandparents provide support to their children when have ...
Sustainable intergenerational programmes: training opportunities for professionals
It was in the United States during the 1960s that intergenerational programmes - "initiatives or programmes that increased cooperation, interaction and intergenerational exchange" - first...
A provocation
The war on the old came out at the end of 2016, and I missed it at the time. The author is John Sutherland, formerly Lord Northcliffe Professor of English Literature at University College Lon...
Dataviz for the sake of dataviz
I was recently invited to sit on a very intriguing panel on the future of data visualisation, organized by the Academic Research Support team at Oxford IT Services. The #datavizox event aimed to br...
Three stimuli during 2017
Towards the end of this year (2017), I wish to reflect on three exceptional moments of academic impetus: Impetus 1: Turning against our future selves...(?!) Age is the only category of discri...
Where’s the support for living longer?
As I wrote in an earlier blog for this site, one of the greatest achievements of humankind has to be that as many people as possible are living as long as possible. At least now we seem to have the...
It Takes A (Retirement) Village: How To Address The Crisis In Housing for the Elderly
“It takes a Village,” Hillary Rodham Clinton once famously wrote. She was referring to how societies can best support children to become able, resilient adults. But I think the same pri...
Social Pensions – a quiet revolution which could help end poverty?
Attention in development debates is not often focussed on the income needs of older people. Topics ranging from emergency relief to maternal and child health tend to dominate the discourse. So to r...
Lessons from the Economies of Russia, East Europe and China for Reform of the Health Sector in North Korea and Korean Unification
North Korea has been attracting attention in the UK press for ballistic missiles shot through Japanese airspace, tests of nuclear weapons, and its exchanges of polemics with a leader of a major dem...
Older women and body image: beauty standards are not democratic
The representation of women in the media and in the fashion industry has been for long at the centre of countless controversies. For decades, an ideal of beauty has been developing mostly around nu...