Series editors’ preface

Summary

Global ageing and the increasing numbers of older people in all world regions raise new issues and concerns for consideration by academics, policy makers and health and social care professionals around the world. Ageing in a Global Context is a book series, published by Policy Press in association with the British Society of Gerontology, that aims to influence and transform debates in what is a fast-moving field in research and policy. The series seeks to achieve this in three main ways. First, the series publishes books which rethink key questions shaping debates in the study of ageing. This has become particularly important given the restructuring of welfare states, especially in the Global North, alongside the complex nature of population change. Each of these elements opens up the need to explore themes which reach beyond traditional perspectives in social gerontology. Second, the series represents a response to the impact of globalisation and related processes, which are contributing to the erosion of the national boundaries that originally framed the study of ageing. This is reflected in the increasing scope and breadth of issues that are explored in contributions to the series, for example: the impact of transnational migration, growing ethnic and cultural diversity, new types of inequality and themes relating to ageing in different environmental contexts. Third, a key concern of the series is to explore interdisciplinary connections in gerontology. Contributions provide a critical assessment of the disciplinary boundaries and territories influencing the study of ageing, creating in the process new perspectives and approaches relevant to the twenty-first century.

In Disability and Ageing: Towards a Critical Perspective, Ann Leahy seeks to challenge some of the taken-for-granted assumptions about the connections between the fields of disability studies and social gerontology. With a strong conceptual grounding in critical gerontology, the book considers the ways in which social policies and cultural practices differently shape the lives of people who are ageing with disability and people who develop disabilities in later life. Ann Leahy uses evidence drawn from a fascinating empirical project to question the siloed approaches that have tended to characterise ageing and disability in terms of theorising, activism and policy making. She suggests that as people age, they experience greater disablement in their bodies and in the contexts of their lives.