Browse
The chapter summarizes the book’s key conclusions. In relation to the current research landscape on midlife, the book sheds light on the usefulness of the concept of life transitions, especially concerning body changes, often in the context of work and care relations. However, these concepts should be embedded in broader processes at various scales – from the ideologies of neoliberal self-sufficiency, management and workplace management to global processes of ageing. In terms of policy, the chapter highlights the challenges and opportunities of more inclusive, gender-aware work schedules and workspaces. It also explores nascent policies and activism related to the recognition of menopausing as a significant process that concerns more than half of the people who have reached midlife and beyond.
This chapter sets the agenda for long-overdue research on the geographies of menopausing. The long process of hormonal change that can have a marked impact on how people use time and space, and relate to each other, the chapter argues, is a highly pertinent issue to which geographers can contribute. By analysing how the contradictory term ‘menopause’ was invented in the medical field, the chapter illuminates awkward temporalities dictated by medical science vocabulary and symptomology, which control women and gender-diverse people as they age. The chapter sheds light on how gendered geographies of power can make an important contribution to researching experiences of menopausing, develop a plurality of knowledge and standpoints, and delve deeper into economic geographies to critically examine hormone treatment supply chains.
Setting the scene for the book, this chapter establishes an argument about midlife spaces and times as relational and embodied. It begins with reflections on the author’s positionality and radical openness to subjective ways in which midlife is experienced. The chapter also presents key approaches relevant to the subsequent chapters, outlining the argument for the importance of narratives that shape midlife spaces, temporalities and experiences. Furthermore, the chapter justifies how midlife relates to broader processes and attitudes towards ageing, particularly in relation to midlife transitions, body changes and work. The chapter introduces the relevance of menopausing as a significant social process with distinct geographies and concludes by alluding to relevant political aspects related to midlife in work and care relations.
In the 21st century, global demographics are rapidly changing, with a higher population of middle-aged people than ever before. As the ‘sandwich’ generation, people in midlife often experience significant work and intergenerational caring responsibilities, yet they are the subject of relatively little research.
This short, accessible book redresses the balance in offering a geographical approach to how people embody and claim space in midlife while analysing the influences of gender, class and location. The author considers midlife in varying socio-cultural and geographical contexts, viewed through the lens of the global neoliberal shift.
This chapter explores the notion of lifecourse transitions and theorizes opportunities and challenges that current lifecourse research presents in relation to midlife. Specifically, it delves into the transitions experienced in the body and in working life. The author argues that transitions are not clear-cut; rather, changes at work, embodied transformations and dynamic situations of care can be better understood if we place these changes within larger processes. At the micro scale, relationships in families and with other relevant people contribute to midlife changes to a great extent. However, they cannot be separated from processes at the macro scale, such as the political economy within which people live and work. The chapter uses original data from the author’s research with middle-aged people who migrate between Latvia, the UK and the Nordic countries and non-migrants in Latvia.
Drawing on original research with middle-aged people in Latvia, the UK and the Nordic countries, this chapter puts forward novel ways of analysing home and relationships as fundamental and highly complex processes in midlife. Particular attention is given in this chapter to how home spaces, places and temporalities construct specific experiences and relationships within families and broader communities. The research explores phenomena of home ownership and societal expectations of what a good life is in midlife, vulnerabilities related to renting in the middle years of the lifecourse, and inheritance as a specific and typical event that shapes relationships and the ways people live. The chapter provides a novel analysis of middle-aged migrants and their motivations to establish a home.
The chapter analyses the key ways in which midlife is narrated in the popular media, psychology, self-help, and feminist writings. By examining the main differences between such texts and the messages they convey, the chapter justifies the argument that we need to be aware of and knowledgeable about the ways we talk about midlife and gendered middle-aged bodies, as these frames shape perceptions and send messages that serve certain agendas and ideologies. Hence, the chapter sheds light on how self-help can result in individualism and psychologism: instead of claiming space outwards, the expectation is to turn inwards. In contrast, feminist writing provides new avenues for embracing the middle years with their turning points, questioning neoliberal impositions, claiming space and time, and looking forward to ageing.
This article provides the reader with a theoretical framework and a method of representing cities called cartographies of infrastructural imaginations. The study employs mapping methods from the fields of architecture, urban geography and visual cultures. The research inquires about the role of cartography in the analysis of discourses that define policies of water supply, food distribution and land-use regulation, which are three environmental challenges in cities. How can we identify and situate the urban actors that attend to such challenges in cities from the Global South?
The research is empirically grounded in Mexico City, Shanghai and Bangalore, urban settlements with a history of colonial occupation in previous centuries. Their foreign interventions still shape urban imaginaries of these cities. The method of blending photographic analysis with maps aims to offer objective precision of geographical data and subjective street-level views of local stories. The intention is to understand where the infrastructural ideas come from, and how imaginaries flow to communicate visions about the development of the city. A central task here is to frame how power structures interact and represent their interests via utopian and dystopian narratives.
This chapter offers community orientation as a template for radical and anti-oppressive practice, that is, practice that takes account of context and works in a relationship-based and partnered way with people in the communities where they live and go about their lives. In doing so, it proposes that such practice offers an effective bridge between critical and radical social work as a critique of social policy and actual practice in real-life situations found in the mainstream of social work, including statutory settings. It introduces the concepts of community orientation and generalism that underpin the individual practice that is essential in community social work and makes brief mention of the important theoretical contributions of Freire and Gramsci in their development of critical pedagogy.
Climate change is no longer a contention of some in the scientific community but a fact accepted by governments internationally. It is manifested in many different ways, though mostly through the manner in which human actions are impacting the environment. This chapter looks at this from a community social work perspective and suggests that this social work model is well placed to be practised in a way that can help disadvantaged communities deal with the consequences of climate change, from floods, storms, wildfires and paralysing snowfalls to the inward migration of displaced people. While traditional social workers might be deployed to respond in the wake of a disaster, workers already embedded in the community might offer more through their networking and local knowledge. They are also well placed to help build resilience through the preventative and proactive approaches that are essential components of community social work.
