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Childbearing and family life in a context of political-economic change: Insights from fieldwork among the Karen in Thailand and Burma
For my forthcoming book Learning, Migration and Intergenerational Relations I conducted fieldwork between November 2013 and January 2014 in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I stayed there for six weeks to rev...
Why do French women live longer than English?
I have long been intrigued by the differential life expectancy between English women and our near neighbours – the French. Since 1945 there has been a consistent 2 year gap between French and...
What jobs will centenarians be doing at the end of the century?
“What jobs will centenarians be doing at the end of the century?” asked the man from the BBC…. Rohit Talwar, a futurologist, had declared at last week’s Headmasters&rsqu...
Is low fertility a problem?
Latest Government figures showed the city had the fourth lowest number of births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 in the UK in 2014, with 43.9. Only the City of London, Camden a...
Migration is reshaping the family
2015 may well be seen as a transitional year in terms of cross-border migration. Already in 2013, 232 million people – 3.2 per cent of the world's population – lived outside their c...
Resilience beyond ‘Keep Calm and Carry on’…?
Increasingly, over the past months starting in May 2015 at a Rockefeller Foundation Think Tank Session in Bellagio on ‘Redefining Resiliency and Ageing’, I found resilience and the mann...
Does it matter where we live, again again?
In June, I asked “does it matter where we live?” in view of the increasing urbanisation and ageing of the world’s population. Around three quarters of Europe’s ...
Older People’s Association in South-East Asia
In July this year I returned from a month-long trip to SE Asia where I was helping to coordinate a research project funded by Age International, WHO and the European Commission. The aim of th...
A Miscellanea of Interesting Links
Human Development in Colour Sometimes you can trawl twitter for days and find nothing more than the odd gif of a large cucumber surprising a cat. Other times, you can stumble across the mo...
Intergenerational Contact Zones: What and Why?
Those who study the health and wellbeing of older adults emphasize the importance of having opportunities to remain active, civically engaged, and socially connected with others – across gene...
Open Data and Open Research
The Oxford University podcasts have just published a couple of short video documentaries in their Openness at Oxford series; one about Open Data and one about Open Research. They feature numerous i...
Helping a workforce age, not helping an ageing workforce: the importance of Work Ability for ageing
It was recently reported that increasing the employment rate for 55-59 year olds will boost the UK economy by £100bn per annum. PwC’s ‘Golden Age’ index, which examines how ...
Ideals and Intentions: Discussing Fertility at the Asian Population Association Conference
This week I’ve been attending the 3rd Asian Population Association Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. While, I have presented a paper and a couple of posters, the most interesting th...
The great escape
Although Angus Deaton’s book The great escape: health, wealth and the origins of inequality was published in 2013, it is still being reviewed, and rightly so. It certainly deserve...
Is fertility stalling in sub-Saharan Africa?
Sub-Saharan Africa is not only the last region to initiate the fertility transition, it also has experienced a weaker pace of decline in fertility compared to other regions. While the global ...