The Aging–Disability Nexus

As the global population ages, disability demographics are shifting. Societal transformation and global health inequities have changed who is likely to reach old age, who is likely to live with disability, and the relationship between aging and disability in various socio-cultural and geopolitical contexts.

The Aging–Disability Nexus breaks new ground by bringing gerontology and disability studies into dialogue with each other through a variety of empirical, conceptual, and pedagogical approaches. Contributors explore the tensions that shape the way disability and aging are understood, experienced, and responded to at both individual and systemic levels, while avoiding the common tendency to conflate these overlapping elements and map them onto a normative, faulty notion of the human life trajectory.

This perceptive work analyzes the distinction between aging with a disability and aging into disability, and reveals how multiple identities, socio-economic forces, culture, and community give form to our experiences.

Katie Aubrecht is a Canada Research Chair in Health Equity and Social Justice, the director of the Spatializing Care: Intersectional Disability Studies Lab, and an assistant professor of sociology at St. Francis Xavier University. She has guest edited special issues of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, the Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal, and Health, Culture, and Society. Christine Kelly is an assistant professor in community health sciences and a research affiliate with the Centre on Aging at the University of Manitoba. She is a co-editor, with Michael Orsini, of Mobilizing Metaphor: Art, Culture, and Disability Activism in Canada and author of Disability Politics and Care: The Challenge of Direct Funding. Carla Rice is a Canada Research Chair in Care, Gender, and Relationships in the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences at the University of Guelph, and the founder and academic director of the Re•vision Centre for Art and Social Justice. She is the author of Becoming Women: The Embodied Self in Image Culture and, with May Friedman and Jen Rinaldi, co-editor of Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social Justice.

Contributors: Rachel Barken, Ruth Bartlett, Akwasi Boafo, Lucy Burke, Nadine Changfoot, May Chazan, Sally Chivers, Maggie FitzGerald, Amanda Grenier, Meridith Griffin, Nancy Hansen, Alison Kafer, Nathan Kerrigan, Poland Lai, Monique Lanoix, Colleen McGrath, Anne McGuire, Margaret Oldfield, Alan Santinele Martino

I really appreciated the breadth of topics, including experiences of dance among people with Parkinson’s; an arts-based initiative called Re•Vision, which seeks to disrupt normative narratives of aging and disability; and the stories of two women aging with and aging into cognitive disability. Furthermore, with few exceptions, most theoretical discussions are illustrated with compelling real world examples.

The Aging-Disability Nexus provides a comprehensive overview of current studies on the relationships between aging and disabilities[...]