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SOCS217 Sociology of Ageing

10 cp
Prerequisites 10 cp from 100-level units in Sociology
Incompatible SOCI217 Sociology of Ageing
Teaching Organisation 3 hours per week for twelve weeks or equivalent of lectures and workshops.

Since the mid nineteenth century, children, young people and more recently the elderly have been the objects of unrelenting scientific and regulatory practices. This unit explores the historical, theoretical and socio-political development of ideas, practices and policies relating to children, young people and older people.

It explores these accounts focusing on the concepts used to demarcate boundaries between stages in the life-cycle, the variety of scientific techniques used to describe those ages cohorts and the attempts to construct normative ideas about roles, appropriate behaviours and capacities. We consider also how these ideas help shape experiences of being young or old. This includes a detailed examination of the role of constitute metaphors around ideas like, infant, teenagers, and frail aged. In this part of the unit, the student will be encouraged to identify and reflect on the underlying assumptions as well as the social, economic and political context in which theses accounts are framed.
Students are introduced to a governmentality framework. Policies and the evolution of key institutions are also explored (ie kindergarten, school, aged care agencies), along with practices (ie education, health care, psychometrics) and knowledge (ie demography, geriatrics, epidemiology, psychology of individual differences). Within this framework, alternative approaches to current issues such as the education-employment nexus, population policy (ie fertility rates, immigration policy) and taxation/superannuation are explored.

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