Polarizing Uses of Older Age: Introducing the Forum “Too Old for the Job?”

Anita  Wohlmann

doi:10.7146/ageculturehumanities.v8i.147380

Polarizing Uses of Older Age

Introducing the Forum “Too Old for the Job?”

Authors

Anita Wohlmann SDU

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7146/ageculturehumanities.v8i.147380

Abstract

The Forum in Issue 8 of Age, Culture, Humanities is dedicated to the timely topic of the 2024 US American presidential elections, where the role of older age has loomed over the campaign. We invited distinguished colleagues from the USA, Canada, and Denmark to contribute short comments and reflections from an age studies perspective. Eight of them accepted, despite the short deadline, and their essays were published in instalments from mid-April to mid-July 2024.

In this introduction, I expand on one topic that popped up again and again, namely the polarizing tendencies many observed in the current discourse. I ask: What is the role of age in the context of polarization?

References

Browning, Kellen. “Asked About Their Ages, Biden Deflects and Trump Brags About His Golf Skills,” The New York Times, 27 June 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/27/us/politics/biden-trump-age-golf.html

Coleman, Peter T., The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization, Columbia University Press, 2021.

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Fiorina, Morris P. and Samuel J. Abrams, “Political Polarization in the American Public,” Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 11, 2008, 563-588. doi: 10.1146/annurev.polisci.11.053106.153836.

Gilleard, Chris, and Paul Higgs, “Third and Fourth Ages,” The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Health, Illness, Behavior, and Society, edited by William C. Cockerham, Robert Dingwall, and Stella Quah. Chichester, UK, 2014, 1-7. doi:10.1002/9781118410868.wbehibs139.

Lewis, R.W.B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, University of Chicago Press, 1955.

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Published

2024-07-07

How to Cite

Wohlmann, A. . “Polarizing Uses of Older Age: Introducing the Forum ‘Too Old for the Job?’”. Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 8, July 2024, doi:10.7146/ageculturehumanities.v8i.147380.

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Issue

Vol. 8 (2024): Age, Culture, Humanities (special issue: "Transitional and Relational Aging: Part 2" and Forum: "Too Old for the Job?")

Section

Forum Introduction

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

From issue 6 (2022) onward, the journal uses the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license. The authors retain their copyright. For articles published in previous issues (1,2,3,4 and 5) the authors retain their copyright to their articles. Readers can download, read, and link to the articles published in issues 1-5, but they cannot republish these articles. Authors can upload them in their institutional repositories.