Symposium: Healthy transitions and retirement (online)

Symposium: Healthy transitions at older age and retirement

Transitions in the lifecourse are an opportunity for health sustaining change, but also a source of potential uncertainty as access to the determinants of health changes. Uncertainties can be magnified at times of social and economic change. Austerity, extended working lives, shifting cultural norms around healthy ageing, and experiences of pandemic have all radically transformed experiences of transitions such as retirement. This symposium, hosted by the Copenhagen Centre for Health Research in Humanities and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health (Exeter) brings together humanities and social science research from to explore these issues. Three panellists (Astrid Pernille Jesperson, Shruti Raghuraman and Jessie Stanier) will present research on transitions at older age in European contexts, and open up debate to all participants, to be continued informally over refreshments.

Chair:

Judith Green, Director WCCEH and Professor of Sociology

Speakers:

Prof Astrid Pernille Jespersen

Astrid Pernille Jespersen is Director of the Copenhagen Centre for Health Research in the Humanities at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen. Trained as an ethnologist her main research focus lies within: Cultural analysis and humanistic health research, particularly health in everyday life, lifestyle changes, obesity, ageing, physical activity and interdisciplinary as well as public-private collaborations. She has played a leading role in theoretical developments of context-sensitive, practice-based understandings of health and ageing in everyday life and methodological developments of qualitative methods and tools that can be integrated in the designs of clinical research and in engaged outreach activities. These achievements have been developed through several years of close collaboration with researchers from other faculties at UCPH as well as collaborations with public and private partners.

Jessie Stanier

Jessie Stanier s a final year PhD student at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. She takes an engaged approach to her research on phenomenology, ageing, and older age. Heeding insights offered by participants in original qualitative interviews, her project explores how depoliticised ‘successful ageing’ discourses tend to cast individuals as responsible for building up ‘good habits’ for later life, even though ageing is largely hidden from habitual everyday experience. Jessie has also published on critical phenomenology of pain and its expression, and has co-edited a special issue of Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology on ‘Pandemic Politics & Phenomenology’. She is Chair of the International Symposium for the British Society of Phenomenology.

Shruti Raghuraman

Shruti Raghuraman is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the College of Medicine and Health, University of Exeter. Her research interests include psychological trauma, disability rights, women’s mental health, and ageing and cognitive health. Shruti has clinical experience in the diagnosis and management of dementia and mild cognitive impairment and has previously worked as part of a small, multi-disciplinary team that set up a first-of-its-kind dementia service for older people in Chennai, India. She will be talking about her work on the Inclusivity Project, at European Centre for Environment and Human Health.

This seminar will take place in person and online.

If you would like to attend in person, please register separately here.

The event will be recorded and published on the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health YouTube channel, so by attending you acknowledge you may be recorded. To maintain privacy, you are welcome to keep your video turned off and change your Zoom screen name.

If you have any questions, please contact wellcomecentre@exeter.ac.uk.

Banner photo (cropped): by Aaron Burden on Unsplash