Ageing, Self-Reflection, and the Run-up to 12 May 2020

This blog has been dormant for a few months due to a variety of reasons (a period of illness, a deadline for manuscript submission, disruption to travel by flooding, and a global pandemic) but I have managed to keep going with the research for ‘Understanding Social Change through Autobiographical Narrative’. Last Autumn, I was in Brighton researching in the Mass Observation (MO) Archive in the Keep and I have been progressed with a number of the strands of the project as listed in my first post on this blog. In particular, I have been working on my own self-reflexive writing so that in best MO fashion I can observe my own subjectivity as part of the project: examining both my own motivations for doing research and how I myself respond to social change by writing about it. To this end, I have been writing a Covid-19 journal for MO, which has turned into a quite substantive diary dealing with many facets of my life. Indeed, I think one way to take this project forward would be to continue this diary and expand its focus more generally to social change in the twenty first century. In the meantime, I am going to take part in the MO call for day diaries for #12May2020. This is the tenth anniversary of this annual call and in celebration of that I shall be posting the day diary (now posted here) I submitted for #12May2010 on this blog on Tuesday 12 May 2020 and then on the following day, I will post the day diary I have written for #12May2020 (now posted here).

I’m also going to post a short series of blogs about my research on ageing carried out in collaboration with colleagues at Brunel, Demos, MO and the University of the Third Age as part of the New Dynamics of Ageing programme. Our project was called ‘Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing’, but I mainly worked on responses to the MO directives on ‘Growing Older’ (Winter 1992), ‘Age’ (Autumn 2006) and ‘Books and You’ (Winter 2009). I want to blog about this project because it was about the representation of older people and one of the things we emphasised was older people’s dislike of the term ‘elderly’ because of its connotations of vulnerability. We are currently living in a situation in which the media has been discussing the vulnerability of the elderly continually for nearly three months. This cannot be good and therefore I am offering a series of posts on this blog discussing my research on ageing to register a contestation of those representations. At the same time, I will use these posts to reflect on my past practice as a researcher using MO and what I feel about that now.

Ageing Series

1. Why I Chose to Use the Mass Observation Project for My Research on Ageing (13 minutes)
2. Ageing is Not a Social Problem: How people negotiate the fixed categories of ageing created by the postwar welfare state (13 minutes)
3. Growing Old with the Welfare State (9 minutes)
4. Ageing, Gender and Moving Beyond Binary or Hierarchical Thinking (9 minutes)