Ageing, Diversity and Equality

Front matter

Ageing, Diversity and Equality: Social Justice Perspectives

Current understandings of ageing and diversity are impoverished in three main ways. Firstly, with regards to thinking about what inequalities operate in later life there has been an excessive preoccupation with economic resources. On the other hand, less attention has been paid to cultural norms and values, other resources, wider social processes, political participation and community engagement. Secondly, in terms of thinking about the ‘who’ of inequality, this has so far been limited to a very narrow range of minority populations. Finally, when considering the ‘how’ of inequality, social gerontology’s theoretical analyses remain under-developed. The overall effect of these issues is that social gerontology remains deeply embedded in normative assumptions which serve to exclude a wide range of older people.

Ageing, Diversity and Equality: Social Justice Perspectives aims to challenge and provoke the above described normativity and offer an alternative approach which highlights the heterogeneity and diversity of ageing, associated inequalities and their intersections, in relation to:

PART I Gender 23 Introduction to Part I 23 SUE WESTWOOD

2 Socio-economic inequalities in later life: the role of gender 25 ATHINA VLACHANTONI

3 Gender, (in)equality and the body in later life 36 LAURA HURD CLARKE

4 Gender and the social imaginary of the fourth age 48 CHRIS GILLEARD AND PAUL HIGGS

5 Ageing without children, gender and social justice 66 ROBIN A. HADLEY

6 Trans(gender)/gender-diverse ageing 82 JENNY-ANNE BISHOP ose AND SUE WESTWOOD vill Contents

PART II Sexualities 99 Introduction to Part II 99 SUE WESTWOOD JANE TRAIES

8 Gay men and ageing 114 MARK HUGHES AND PETER ROBINSON

9 Bisexuality and ageing: striving for social justice 131 SARAH JEN

10 Heterosexual ageing: interrogating the taken-for-granted norm 147 SUE WESTWOOD PART III Culture, ethnicity and religion 165 Introduction to Part IIT 165 SUE WESTWOOD

11 Ethnicity, race and care in older age: what can a social justice framework offer? 167 SANDRA TORRES 12 Migration, ageing and social inclusion 181

13 Older migrants: inequalities of ageing from a transnational perspective 194 ALISTAIR HUNTER

14 Ageing, religion and (in)equality 210 PETER KEVERN

Contents ix

PART IV Disabilities, long-term conditions and care 223 Introduction to Part IV 223

SUE WESTWOOD 15 Ageing with physical disabilities and/or long-term health conditions 225

16 The intersectionality of intellectual disability and ageing 245 KAREN WATCHMAN 17 Ageing with HIV 259

DANA ROSENFELD, DAMIEN RIDGE AND JOSE CATALAN, ON BEHALF OF THE HIV AND LATER LIFE (HALL) TEAM

18 Older people and deficiencies in the formal care system: equality and rights 276 JONATHAN HERRING

PART V Spatiality 291 Introduction to Part V 291 19 Ageing and spatial equality 293 MARTIN HYDE

20 Rural ageing and equality 311 VANESSA BURHOLT, PAULA FOSCARINI-CRAGGS AND

BETHAN WINTER

21 Ageing in the workplace 329 ANNETTE COX

Contributors

Jenny-Anne Bishop OBE is a retired chemist, a voluntary worker for transgender/LGBT communities, and an elder of the URC LGBT-Congregation Manchester. She sits on the Parliamentary Forum on Gender-Identity and the Welsh Strategic Equality Plan Board, advising many public service providers on trans inclusion and equality. Her interests are: establishing full rights for all gender diverse people, improving reporting of transphobic/homophobic hate crime, advancing NHS gender care provision and implementing better health and social care provision for older LGBT people. Awarded an OBE for services to the trans community, Jenny-Anne and her partner Elen run the North Wales trans community house.

Vanessa Burholt (BSc, PhD, FAcSS) is Professor of Gerontology and Director of the Centre for Innovative Ageing (CIA) in the College of Human and Health Sciences at Swansea University, and Director of the Pan-Wales Centre for Ageing and Dementia Research (CADR). Vanessa’s research focuses on older people’s attachment to people and places, and she has published over 50 papers and book chapters on rurality, loneliness, support networks, intergenerational relationships, ethnicity and migration. Professor Burholt has 24 years’ experience of research on ageing, and, over the last few years, she has worked on and led research projects worth approximately €21 million.

Nicola Carey is a Reader and lead for the Long-Term Conditions and Ageing Cluster within the School of Health Sciences at the University of Surrey. She is a qualified nurse who has worked in a variety of posts across the country in primary care as both a practice nurse and nurse practitioner. She also spent two years in the United States whilst undertaking her Master’s in Public Health in community health education and was involved in several national- and state-level projects, including the Youth Risk Behaviour Survey. Nicola’s research interests include quality improvement, workforce development, non-medical prescribing and patient self-management. She has significant experience in the conduct and management of multi-site studies and mixed methods research.

Contributors xi

Jose Catalan, MSc (Oxon), DPM, FRCPsych, formerly Reader in Psychiatry at Imperial College London, and Honorary Consultant Liaison Psychiatrist, CNWL NHS Foundation Trust, London, is a psychiatrist who has been involved in mental health research and provision of care for people with HIV infection since the early 1980s. He has published extensively in psychiatric and medical journals and co-authored or edited four books. He is a founding member and trustee since 1991 of the International Committee AIDS IMPACT, a charity that organises international AIDS conferences on psychological and social issues. Jose’s current research interests include ageing and HIV and the history of care provision for people with HIV in the UK.

Helen Codd is Professor of Law and Social Justice at the University of Central Lancashire. She has an extensive international record of research and publications in relation to prisons, prisoners and prisoners’ families, and her work has been cited with approval by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights. Questions of diversity, especially in relation to gender and ageing, have underpinned her research throughout her career. She has a strong record of collaboration and consultancy with third sector voluntary organisations and NGOs, and is currently a Lay Adviser to the Lancashire MAPPA Strategic Management Board, appointed by the Ministry of Justice. Helen is an Associate Research Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, and a Fellow of the RSA.

Annette Cox works in government social research in the data analytics and business statistics team at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. She was previously Director, Employment Policy Research, at the Institute for Employment Studies and Lecturer in Human Resource Management at Manchester Business School. Annette has wide labour market research interests spanning ageing, skills development, organisational innovation and reward management. She has conducted over 60 published research projects with funding from numerous organisations including UK government departments and agencies, European institutions and charitable foundations.

Paula Foscarini-Craggs (PhD) is a research assistant at the Centre for Trials Research at Cardiff University. She received her undergraduate psychology degree from Glendon College, York University, Canada. In 2011, she moved to Swansea University to undertake her PhD, which focused on the role of personality traits on diet and exercise behaviour. Since completing her PhD she has worked on a variety of research projects, including contributing to the development of an updated scale assessing neurobehavioural outcomes following brain injury, examining affecting equality in rural ageing, and looking at the role of identity on exercise behaviour in children.

Chris Gilleard is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath and a Visiting Research xii Contributors

Fellow in the Division of Psychiatry at University College London. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the author and co-author of a number of books, book chapters and papers on contemporary aspects of ageing and old age.

Robin A. Hadley’s PhD (Keele, 2015) examined the experiences of involuntarily childless older men. He is a founding member of the campaign group Ageing Without Children. Recently, he collaborated in research projects on dementia technology, health monitoring technology and fathers’ influence on infant feeding. Previous careers include counsellor, scientific photographer and kitchen assistant. Robin’s counselling and own experience of childlessness led him to self-fund his MA and MSc (University of Manchester, 2008; 2009) on the desire for fatherhood and the levels of desire for parenthood in childless people and parents. He was born in Manchester, the seventh of eight children.

Jonathan Herring is Vice Dean and Professor of Law at the Law Faculty, Oxford University and DM Wolfe-Clarendon Fellow in Law at Exeter College, Oxford University. He has written on family law, medical law, criminal law and legal issues surrounding care and old age. His recent books include Vulnerable Adults and the Law (2016); Vulnerability, Childhood and the Law (2018); Caring and the Law (2014); Older People in Law and Society (OUP, 2009); Medical Law and Ethics (OUP, 2018); Criminal Law (OUP, 2018); and Family Law (Pearson, 2017).

Paul Higgs is Professor of the Sociology of Ageing at University College London. He is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and of the Academy of Social Sciences and co-editor of the journal Social Theory and Health. He has published widely in both social gerontology and medical sociology, his most recent books being (with Gilleard) Personhood, Identity and Care in Advanced Old Age (2016) and (with Hyde) Ageing and Globalisation (2017).

Mark Hughes is Professor of Social Work and Chair of Academic Board, Southern Cross University. He has worked as a social worker and as an academic in Australia and the UK, and is a former editor of Australian Social Work. Mark’s research interests focus on the organisational dimensions of social work, social work practice with older people, and the ageing experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) older people. He is currently involved in research on the health disparities faced by LGBTI older people, as well as on strategies to reduce gay and bisexual men’s experience of loneliness.

Alistair Hunter is Senior Lecturer in Health and Social Policy at the University of Glasgow. His current research focuses on ageing and dying in migration contexts. His monograph Retirement Home? Ageing Migrant Workers in France and the Question of Return was published by Springer in 2018. Alistair

Contributors xiii serves on the organising board of the IMISCOE research network’s Standing Committee on Ageing Migrants.

Laura Hurd Clarke is Professor of Sociology in the School of Kinesiology at the University of British Columbia. Her body of research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canadian Institute for Health Research and the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. She has published widely on topics such as ageing, body image, chronic illness, disability, embodiment, gender, health, qualitative methods and technology in gerontology, ageing studies and sociology journals. She has also published a book entitled Facing Age: Women Growing Older in Anti- Aging Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011).

Shereen Hussein is Professor of Care and Health Policy Evaluation and Associate Director at the Personal Social Services Research Unit, the University of Kent. She is also Visiting Professor in Applied Statistics at King’s College London. Shereen has extensive research experience of over 25 years in social science in the UK and internationally. Her work on migration, ageing and care has gained significant policy and media attention with practical and policy responses. She is currently conducting international research with partners from Australia, North America, Europe and a number of less economically developed countries focusing on the interplay between ageing, migration, long-term care and social policy.

Martin Hyde is Associate Professor in Gerontology at Swansea University. His main research interests are ageing and later life and he has published on a wide range of topics. He co-authored the book Ageing and Globalisation with Professor Paul Higgs. He has been involved in a number of large-scale studies, including the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). He is the chair of the British Society of Gerontology (BSG) Work and Retirement Group, president of BSG Cymru, a member of the Integrated Datasets in Europe for Ageing Research network and a deputy editor for Ageing & Society.

Sarah Jen, MSW, PhD, earned her BA in sociology and psychology from the University of Michigan and her MSW and PhD in social work from the University of Washington. She is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare. Her research focuses on older women’s experiences of sex and sexual identities as well as bisexuality in later life. Sarah’s research is inspired by her experiences in practice, including several years spent as a volunteer, care giver and social worker in long-term care, sub-acute rehabilitation and hospice and palliative care.

Peter Kevern is Associate Professor in Values in Care at Staffordshire University. He has written widely on the relationship between religious communities and the delivery of health and social care. His main focus for research has been the issues arising at the boundary between dementia xiv Contributors care and religious studies, but he has also contributed to debates on the role of chaplaincy, the theoretical modelling of ‘spiritual care’ and the role of religion in support for carers. Current research projects include a study of the official teaching on ageing in the Roman Catholic Church and an analysis of the strategies for generating spiritual meaning deployed by carers of people with dementia.

Damien Ridge, Professor of Health Studies and Head of Psychology at the University of Westminster, London, is a psychotherapist and sociologist with a special interest in patient experience. He has published over 90 academic papers in areas of HIV, sexuality, mental health, depression, recovery and chronic health conditions. He began as an HIV activist in Melbourne, Australia, in the 1980s, where he annoyed politicians and the mainstream media with positive depictions of gay sexuality in HIV prevention campaigns aimed at mass circulation newsprint, but ultimately drew thousands of isolated gay men into safer sex discussions.

Peter Robinson is Senior Lecturer in History and Sociology at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. His first book, The Changing World of Gay Men (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), examined the lives of three generations of Australian men, aged 20 to 79, and won The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) inaugural Raewyn Connell prize in 2010. His second book, Gay Men’s Relationships Across the Life Course, analysed the life stories of a diverse sample of 97 gay men from nine international cities. Published in 2013, it included a Foreword by the Hon. Michael Kirby, AC CMG. In 2017, Palgrave Macmillan published his third book, Gay Men’s Working Lives, Retirement and Old Age, with a Foreword by Humphrey McQueen. In 2016, he became co-editor of Nexus, TASA’s quarterly magazine.

Dana Rosenfeld, Reader in Sociology and Director of the Keele Centre for Ageing Research, Keele University, is a medical sociologist and social gerontologist researching chronic illness and disability, ageing and the life course, gender and sexuality, and self and identity. She has published widely on lesbian and gay ageing, ageing with HIV, and the lived experience of illness and disability. She was Principal Investigator on the HIV and Later Life (HALL) project; Co-Investigator on an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded seminar series on HIV communities; and a recent Leverhulme Research Fellow. She serves on the editorial boards of Social Theory and Health and the Journal of Aging Studies.

Sandra Torres is Professor of Sociology and the Chair in Social Gerontology at Uppsala University. As a critical social gerontologist, her work problematises old age-related constructs, deconstructs taken-for-granted assumptions that inform research, policy and practice, and uses the sociology of ethnicity and migration to expand the gerontological imagination. In 2016, she co-edited two anthologies for Routledge: Ageing in Contexts of Migration

Contributors xv and Older People and Migration: Challenges for Social Work. Her latest book — Ethnicity & Old Age: Expanding our Imagination — will be published by Policy Press in 2019.

Jane Traies is the author of The Lives of Older Lesbians: Sexuality, Identity and the Life Course (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Now You See Me: Life Stories of Older Lesbians (Tollington Press, 2018), as well as other publications in the fields of ageing and sexualities. She is a research associate in the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex and an active member of the Oral History Society’s LGBTQ Special Interest group.

Athina Vlachantoni is Professor of Gerontology and Social Policy in the Centre for Research on Ageing and the ESRC Centre for Population Change in the University of Southampton; and Deputy Editor of the journal Ageing & Society. She studied social policy in Royal Holloway, University of London, the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics. Athina’s research interests relate to pension protection, informal care provision and receipt, health inequalities over the life course, intergenerational support and unmet need for social care. She is currently Principle Investigator of an ESR.C-SDAI project which uses mixed methods to examine informal care provision among the 1958 birth cohort (National Child Development Study); and Co-Investigator of an ESRC Global Challenges Research Fund network project on global ageing and long-term care.

Karen Watchman is Senior Lecturer in Ageing, Frailty and Dementia in the Faculty of Health Sciences and Sport at the University of Stirling. Karen has worked in the field of intellectual disability, ageing and dementia care for over 25 years in both practice and academic settings. She has published extensively in this area, produces a range of accessible information for people with intellectual disability and carers, and provides consultancy in the UK and internationally. She is currently Principal Investigator of an Alzheimer’s Society project to collaboratively implement non-pharmacological interventions with people who have an intellectual disability and dementia.

Sue Westwood is a socio-legal and social gerontological scholar, working as a consultant academic and as Lecturer in Law, York Law School, University of York, UK. Her book Ageing, Gender and Sexuality: Equality in Later Life, published by Routledge in 2016, won the Socio Legal Studies Association Early Career Book Prize for 2017. Her second book, co-edited with Elizabeth Price, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans* (LGBT*) Individuals Living with Dementia: Concepts, Practice and Rights, was also published by Routledge in 2016.A further collection, Older Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Tians People: Minding the Knowledge Gaps, co-edited with Andrew King, Kathryn Almack and Yiu-Tung Suen, was published by Routledge in 2018.

xvi Contributors

Bethan Winter (PhD) is a research assistant in the Centre for Innovative Ageing in the College of Human and Health Sciences at Swansea University. Before working in academia, Bethan spent many years working as a development practitioner, and held policy and strategic roles in housing and community. In 2010, she moved to Swansea University and has worked on a range of research projects covering topics such as age discrimination, dementia studies, participatory arts and housing. Bethan is passionate about linking research with practice, and in 2018 she completed her PhD, entitled ‘Disadvantage and Advantage among Older People in Rural Communities: A Multi-level and Life-Course Perspective’.

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to each of the contributors, who have so patiently stuck with me through what has turned out to be quite a complex process. The high standard of their authorship is something I appreciate and value, and is what has made the book something we can all be proud of. Rosie Harding and Ruth Fletcher may find it odd to be named, yet again, in my acknowledgements, but their ‘growing’ of me sticks with me, and I am constantly drawing upon all they taught me. I thought they would also take satisfaction from knowing I had to re-format several chapters’ reference lists into the wee small hours. Chicago, Chicago. My dear friends have sustained me, as ever. I am especially grateful that not one of them has ever said ‘Haven’t you finished it yet?’ even though they must have been tempted. Lastly, and most importantly, I want to acknowledge all those individuals who have participated in the research projects which we have all drawn upon in our analyses, both our own and other’s research. Without their (diverse) voices, all of this would be nought.

Ageing, diversity and equality

As Daatland and Biggs (2006, 1) observed over a decade ago, ‘to understand contemporary societal ageing, there is a need to recognise its diversity’. However, social gerontology continues to approach ageing from homogenous, normative perspectives (Martinson and Berridge, 2014) with insufficient attention paid to diversity:

There is a staggering lack of evidence for some groups and certain aspects of inequalities. We have ignored or overlooked the diversity of our ageing population, arguably through focusing primarily on the differences between young and old.

(Centre for Ageing Better, 2017, 12)

There is a long-standing body of literature on ageing, gender and class (Arber and Ginn, 1991; Arber, Davidson and Ginn, 2003; Calasanti and Slevin, 2013). However, this has very often failed to connect with other social divisions, and sites of inequality. While lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) ageing is also beginning to be addressed within research (Rosenfeld 2003, 2010; Ward, River and Sutherland, 2012; Hoy-Ellis and Fredriksen-Goldsen, 2017), diversity among older LGBT people is less well recognised (Blood and Bamford 2010; Westwood, 2016; Westwood and Price, 2016). Furthermore, heterosexual ageing remains a taken-for-granted norm, informing much of mainstream gerontological research in an under-interrogated way (Cronin, 2006). While research is now also addressing culture, ethnicity and ageing (Torres, 2015; Ute and Torres, 2015) and religion, spirituality and ageing (Mackinlay, 2015), the subtleties, complexities, nuances and intersections in these areas are also not yet well addressed (Zubair and Norris, 2015).

Similarly, while there is a growing body of literature on older people and social care (Vlachantoni et al., 2015; Daly and Westwood, 2017) it mostly refers to the needs of older people with age-acquired disabilities and health conditions, rather than those ageing with them. Indeed, the trope of “successful ageing’ is predicated upon the assumption of their absence. Issues affecting older people with learning/intellectual disabilities are particularly under-addressed (Ward, 2015). Moreover, while there is growing academic interest in spatiality as a dimension of inequality, ageing spatialities, beyond the urban/rural dichotomy (Buffel, Phillipson and Scharf, 2012; Burholt and Dobbs, 2012) remain under-explored (Schwanen, Hardill and Lucas, 2012), particularly workplace ageing and ageing in hidden contexts, such as prisons (O’Hara et al., 2015).

In addition to the ‘who’ and the ‘where’ of ageing, diversity and inequality, the ‘what’ (Baker et al., 2016) has also been considered along relatively narrow lines. Social gerontologists have considered inequalities in terms of social and economic contexts (Angel and Settersten, 2013) including at their intersection with ‘class’ (Formosa and Higgs, 2015), and the ‘interplay of health disparities, economic resources, and public policies’ (Crystal, 2017, 205). These have been analysed at local, national and comparative international and global levels (Hyde and Higgs 2016; OECD, 2017). In his recent review of critical gerontology, and the theoretical/philosophical concepts underpinning it, Jan Baars (2017) has observed that social inequality in terms of material reproduction has been prioritised over social inequality in terms of cultural reproduction. His analysis highlights not only the privileging of materiality but also the binary ways in which inequality is approached, i.e. the material and/or the cultural.

In terms of the ‘how’ (Baker et al., 2016) of ageing and inequality, this has been addressed, to a greater or lesser extent, by the main theories in social gerontology, i.e. ‘(1) social constructionist, (2) social exchange, (3) life course, (4) feminist, (5) age stratification (age and society), (6) political economy of aging, and (7) critical theory’ (Bengtson, Burgess and Parrott, 1997, S72). Social constructionist theories of ageing emphasise how older age(s) are socially constituted positions, which change according to cultural, temporal and spatial contexts. More recently, they have pointed to ‘increasing diversity within age categories and cohorts that is accompanied by cumulative inequalities across all phases of life’ (Mortimer, Jeylan and Moen, 2016, 111). Life course theories (Shanahan, Mortimer and Johnson, 2016) have emphasised in particular the significance of cumulative dis/advantage across a lifetime (Dannefer, 2003; DiPrete and Eirich, 2006). However, notions that lifetimes follow a particular ‘course’ are imbued with assumptions about how lives are lived, predicated on heterosexist reproductive norms (Carpenter, 2010). Feminist theories (Arber and Ginn, 1991; Calasanti and Slevin, 2013) have focused on the centrality of gender as an organising principle in life and in ageing, the comparative socioeconomic disadvantages of older women compared with older men and ‘how the dominant social institutions render older women vulnerable and dependent throughout their life course’ (Estes, 2017, 81). While social constructionist, life course and feminist theories have much to offer to an analysis of wider ageing diversity and inequality, they have not been applied to this as much as they might have been.

Critical gerontology is ‘an interdisciplinary sub-field consisting mostly of humanities and social science scholars who challenge the assumptions of mainstream gerontology and biomedical models of ageing’ (Katz, 2015, 29). It has focused on three main conceptual areas:

Firstly, political economy ‘. . . postulates that aging and old age are directly related to the nature of the society in which they occur and, therefore, cannot be considered or analyzed in isolation from other societal forces and characteristics’... . Secondly, moral economy studies aging and old age through ‘. . . norms, beliefs and values in a given context’... . Finally, humanistic gerontology focuses on larger questions of meaning in the lives of the older people.

These theories are themselves restrictive, continuing as they do to focus on socio-economic issues. Moreover, even critical gerontology has, with a few notable exceptions (e.g. Daatland and Biggs, 2006), not considered ageing and diversity in any great depth.

Researchers interested in aging have relentlessly collected mountains of data, often driven by narrowly defined, problem-based questions and with little attention to basic assumptions or larger theoretical issues . . . the lack of attention to theory has meant that research questions have often been informed by an uncritical reliance on images and assumptions about aging drawn from popular culture or from traditions and paradigms of theory that are considered outdated within the broader discourses of behavioral and social theory.

This ‘uncritical reliance’ has often led to homogenising narratives which make generalisations about ageing based on research which has often not included questions of diversity in its parameters, has not included representative populations (i.e. included people from minorities) and has not incorporated issues of diversity and/or inequality in its analysis. This means that at best associated narratives only apply to majority populations and at worst, they are grossly inaccurate, because they are based only on data from, and analyses of, part of the ageing population.

There is growing recognition of the significance of intersectionality in the social sciences. Intersectionality refers to ‘the mutually constructed nature of social division and the ways these are experienced, reproduced and resisted in everyday life’ (Taylor, 2009, 190). Intersectional analyses ‘look at forms of inequality which are routed through one another, and which cannot be untangled to reveal a single cause’ (Grabham et al., 2009, 1). Intersectionality is generally understood to be significant for ageing.

Multiple factors combine and overlap to influence individual and group experiences of later life. Intersectionality describes the simultaneous impact of characteristics, such as gender, poverty and disadvantage and sexual orientation. It considers the many personal identities and power hierarchies and systems that contribute to discrimination and disadvantage. Intersectionality offers a holistic account of people’s experiences of disadvantage and discrimination in later life and has the potential to offer solutions that are better suited to our increasingly diverse older population.

(Centre for Ageing Better, 2017, 12)

However, while intersectionality has been considered in relation to particular ageing minorities (Cronin and King, 2010), it has not been considered in relation to ageing as a whole. Indeed, much of social gerontology continues with narratives of homogeneity, privileging majority populations. Where minoritised groups are considered, it is often only as an add-on, as a politically correct nod to ‘difference’ without any critical interrogation of the broader normative assumptions which inform social gerontological discourse. Minoritised older people are at best considered in terms of the exotic ‘Other’, rather than being integrated into mainstream theorising. Those working to make the experiences of marginalised older people more visible, and indeed more thinkable, have tended to advocate on behalf of particular groups, e.g. people from minority ethnic backgrounds, or LGBT older people. In order to render their arguments more distinct, they have, inevitable drawn upon the strategic use of identity categories (Bernstein, 2009) to demonstrate comparative inequalities. While understandable, this has, inevitably, led to narratives of ageing and diversity existing in silos, without making (potentially illuminating) connections between uneven outcomes in later life. These silos have then led to diminished power in the voices of those seeking to highlight the heterogeneity of ageing, and associated inequalities.

So, understandings of ageing diversity are currently impoverished in three main ways. Firstly, in terms of thinking about the ‘what’ of inequality, i.e. what inequalities operate in later life. There has been an excessive preoccupation with economic resources, and to a lesser extent, cultural norms and values, and an under-attention to other resources, wider social processes, and to political participation and community engagement. Secondly, in terms of thinking about the ‘who’ of inequality, this has so far been limited to ‘race’, culture and ethnicity, and LGBT issues, with insufficient attention given to diversity within and among these populations and in relation to other areas of diversity. Thirdly, in terms of thinking about the ‘how’ of inequality, social gerontology’s theoretical analyses remain under-developed. The overall effect of this is that social gerontology remains deeply embedded in normative assumptions which serve to marginalise increasingly relevant minority populations.

This edited collection aims to challenge and provoke this normativity, and offer an alternative approach which highlights the heterogeneity and diversity of ageing. It also aims to explore and critically interrogate the (in)equalities associated with ageing and diversity. The overarching framework of this collection is that of a social justice perspective, engaging with the work of Nancy

Fraser (2013) who approaches social justice from three interrelated dimensions: resources (economic), recognition (social status, cultural visibility and cultural worth) and representation (social and political participation and access to justice). Several authors (Lynch et al., 2016; Westwood, 2016) have expanded Fraser’s concept of resources from economic to include affective resources (love, care and affection), social resources (social support) and formal care provision, and this collection will also do so.

The collection is multidisciplinary, with contributions from both UK and international authors (many of whom are leaders in their fields) from a wide range of backgrounds: cultural studies, demography, economics, ethics, social gerontology, health sciences, history, law, migration studies, psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, social justice, social policy, social work, sociology, socio-legal studies, statistics. Several activists are also co-contributors, combining academic perspectives with lived experiences. This wide variety of perspectives is unified by each chapter being framed around the same theoretical structure, i.e. Fraser’s social justice model.