Ageing Selves and Everyday Life in the North of England : Years in the Making

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. Challenging both the notion of a homogenous relationship with time across generations and the idea of a universalised middle-aged self, 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.Seeking to better understand 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 Seeking to better understand 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 an English former coal mining village, the book focuses on the everyday experiences of older people living there. It explores how the category of old age comes to be assigned and experienced in daily life through multiple registers of interaction Front matter Contents List of figures and maps Acknowledgements Dedication Series editor’s foreword Introduction Dodworth: people and place Endings, pasts and futures: temporal complexities and memory talk Monitoring the boundaries of age: intra-generational perspectiveson ‘old age’ Reconfiguring normative models of self Narrative forms and shapes Conclusions References Index