The Social Construction of Aging and Ageism

Catalog description

Same as SOC 3300 and GERON 3300 . This course examines perspectives of age, aging, and ageism using several perspectives: the theory of social construction and the frameworks of essentialism and intersectionality. The materials, discussions, and assignments in this course will familiarize and provide students with tools to investigate age and ageism in a complex, multidimensional manner. The overarching focus of this course is located in the tension with the “nature versus nurture” debate, paralleling nature with essentialist ideas and nurture with social constructionism. Ideas, conceptions, attitudes, and understandings of age within the media, family, medical community, and other institutions will be investigated as biological and/or a development of society in effort to perpetuate social control, organization, and power dynamics. Through research, fiction and non-fiction work, creative assignments, and theoretical texts, students will approach the following questions: How do we value lived-experiences? How might situated knowledge affect social constructions of aging and ageism? What evidence is provided toward age and/or ageism as an essential or socially constructed outline within society? How are socially constructed ideas developed and perpetuated? How might one affect change in an essentialist and/or socially constructed society?.