FACULTY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY | Seminar
Open urban seminars – Amy Barron

Life as we know it: rethinking age, ageing and the life-course

Amy Barron is a lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Manchester. She is interested in the lived experience of urban difference, inequalities, and social categories. She often explores these themes through the lenses of age, ageing, and the life course. Amidst profound demographic shifts and increasing demands for justice regarding generational and spatial inequalities, a key focus of Amy’s research is providing the conceptual and methodological tools, as well as a wealth of empirical evidence, to explore how specific places are shaped by and shape the variegated lived experiences of urban ageing.

Summary

How might we rethink age, ageing and the life-course, and why does this matter to life as we know it? In this talk, Amy will explore this question, introducing more-than-representational approaches to the life course – a way of moving beyond chronological, linear models to better understand how the life course shapes, mediates, and is lived in the present.

Drawing on two strands of her research, Amy will first examine older age, considering how this category is not simply experienced but also quite literally takes place. She will then turn to her emerging work on middle-age, exploring what it means to think from and through the middle, rather than merely about it, and outlining a research agenda for the geographies of middle-aged lives.
Throughout, she will showcase a suite of creative, participatory methods that bring these questions to life and invite new ways of thinking about age and the life-course.

About

The lecture is part of the Open Urban Seminar Series, organised by the Department of Urban Studies and the Institute for studies in Malmö's history. The lecture will be held in English.