Seeking to explore what it means to grow older in contemporary Britain from the perspective of older people themselves, this richly detailed ethnographic study engages in debates over selfhood and people’s relationships with time. Based on research conducted in a former coal mining village in South Yorkshire, England, Cathrine Degnen explores how the category of ‘old age’ comes to be assigned and experienced in everyday life through multiple registers of interaction, including that of social memory, in a postindustrial context of great social transformation. Degnen argues that the complex interplay of social, cultural and physical attributes of ageing means that older people can come to have a different position in relation to time and to the self than younger people, unseating normative conventions about narrative and temporality.
- ISBN10 1526116944
- ISBN13 9781526116949
- Publish Date 14 April 2017 (first published 1 October 2012)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Manchester University Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 176
- Language English