Ageing has become a ubiquitous concern in European policy. Critics have bemoaned that such policies are not so much about older people but rather about finding justification for other policy aims, such as economic growth or technological innovation. However, such critiques do not capture the co-constitutive relationship between ageing and innovation shaping one another. Using the example of the Silver Economy discourse, we show that ageing has not only been reframed under the imperatives of economic and innovation policies, but that ageing itself can also affect those policies. In its formative stages, the Silver Economy was characterised by a number of tensions between, on the one hand, common ageist assumptions about old age and, on the other hand, alternative visions of what ageing could mean as a policy field. However, these potentials have later been domesticated within the broader field of Active and Healthy Ageing. In this Forum Article, we therefore hypothesise what it would mean to take ageing more seriously as a driver of progressive politics as indicated in those formative years of the Silver Economy. Such a speculative take on current old-age policy, we hold, opens up a number of fruitful avenues and new interfaces between critical researchers, practitioners and policy makers interested in driving progressive politics.

It has often been stated by older people's advocates that discrimination affecting older people is commonplace and ongoing in the Australian labour market. In this article, we contrast such rhetoric with a review of evidence from recent large-scale surveys which demonstrates that low and declining numbers of Australians experience age discrimination, while highlighting the complexity of the phenomenon. We identify the emergence of a fake ‘age’ advocacy that is acting to the detriment of an informed public discourse concerning issues of older workers’ employment. To counter this we propose five underlying principles for advocacy on ageing and work: countering myths concerning the extent and nature of age barriers in the labour market; avoiding and challenging the use of age stereotypes in making the business case for older workers’ employment; recognition that age interacts in complex ways with a range of other factors in determining people's experiences of the labour market; challenging public understanding that is grounded in the notion that generational conflict is inevitable; and discarding traditional notions of the lifecourse in order to overcome disjunctions and contradictions that hamper efforts to encourage and support longer working lives.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has had a significant impact on societies and individual lives across the globe. In this paper, we address the impact of the pandemic and the protective measures on empirical social scientific ageing research through the lens of ‘ethically important moments’. One of the most crucial measures for preventing the spread of the virus includes social distancing; therefore, empirical research methods based on person-to-person direct contact (as in interviews) and first-hand observation have been scaled back since 2020. For ageing research, the challenges are particularly pronounced due to the ongoing discussion regarding vulnerabilities associated with higher age and age-based discrimination. Hence, many researchers focusing on ageing are facing some difficult questions: How and under what conditions can we carry on with empirical research without putting our research participants and ourselves at risk? Firstly, we systematically identify the key dimensions and challenges that have shaped social scientific research during the lockdowns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic: fragmentation, fluidity, ambiguity and uncertainty. Then, using insights from two international research projects, we illustrate and critically reflect on the ethically important moments and practical dilemmas that have resulted from these pandemic challenges when researching with and about older adults.

This paper explores the concept of the completed life outlined in recent writing in the Netherlands on euthanasia and assisted suicide and its implications for ageing studies. Central to this theme is the basic right of people to self-determine the length of their later life, linked with the subsidiary right to assistance in achieving such self-determination. Although the notion of weariness with life has a long history, the recent advocacy of a self-limited life seems shaped by the new social movements presaged upon individual rights together with what might be called a distinctly third-age habitus, giving centre stage to autonomy over the nature and extent of a desired later life, including choice over the manner and timing of a person's ending. In exploring this concept, consideration is given to the notion of a ‘right to die’, ‘rational suicide’ and the inclusion of death as a lifestyle choice. While reservations are noted over the unequivocal good attached to such self-determination, including the limits to freedom imposed by the duty to avoid hurt to society, the article concludes by seeing the notion of a completed life as a challenge to traditional ideas about later life.

The biomedical model has traditionally informed the dominant discourse on dementia and has significantly shaped practitioners’, policy makers’ and researchers’ responses. This model contextualises dementia as a progressive neuro-degenerative cognitive disorder and focuses on deficits and underlying pathology, often overlooking the fact that the person can and should be an active partner in the treatment process. Beginning in the late 1990s, the exclusive reliance on the bio-medical model has come under increasing scrutiny with a growing awareness that by recasting dementia in broader social and more humanitarian terms, much can be done to promote the individual's quality of life. Different frameworks and analytical tools have been forwarded to help us better understand dementia. These include personhood, citizenship, public health, disability and human rights. This review examines the merits of framing dementia as a disability, a citizenship concern and a human rights issue. It highlights some of the potential gains that can arise for the individual in using a human rights model to enhance practice, inform policy and create a more balanced research agenda. The article concludes by arguing that the complexities and magnitude of dementia are such that it requires multiple responses and a broad range of interpretative frameworks.

This article revisits a paper and from an autoethnographic/critical reflective biographical approach re-examines seven cultural notions or myths, which may encourage ageism. It is framed within my experiential knowledge of caring for my ageing parents, with the tensions and challenges around problematising the value of expertise based on experience, communication, grief, and autonomy and freedom versus safety. The commentary emphasises that by analysing the impact of our personal life experiences, we can start to understand both the intended and unintended consequences of policy and practice affecting those in the fourth age. As a social work educator, I wanted to reflect upon how my tacit experiential knowledge, if made explicit, could impact upon my own and others’ learning. The recent death of my father has allowed for a period of reflection on my own caring and indeed my professional social work experience, knowledge, skills and practice. It is argued that the ageing process is unequal as class and socio-economic factors, i.e. geography, age, gender, religion and ethnicity, all play parts in determining how someone ages, and indeed upon the care an individual older person receives. A fuller understanding of negotiating the role of one stakeholder, that of a family carer in the ageing process, is elicited in this paper.

This article contributes to ongoing discussions about frailty and vulnerability in critical gerontology by asserting that possibilities to engage and enact influence in everyday life situations is a crucial dimension of democracy in later life. We discuss how democracy in this sense can be threatened for older persons for whom health and social care services are needed, following from the labelling practices of frailty and the non-recognition of the social processes that set capabilities in motion. We utilise three examples grounded in research with older persons in their home environment in a Swedish context. The examples show how older people use creative, emotional, practical and social resources to integrate activities in a manner that address their needs and capabilities, and influence the situations in direction towards how and when to be engaged in everyday activities. Based on a discussion of the examples, we argue that health and social care services that provide and build social infrastructures need to recognise the potential concurrency of interdependency, vulnerability and agency within older persons’ local everyday practices. This to address capabilities and enable concrete expression of democracy in everyday situations. Overall, we suggest that conceptual and methodological shifts in research, as well as policy and practice, are needed to bring democratic processes forward through the relational and situated aspects of resources, agency and influence.

That older people should be consumers and active agents has dominated policy discourse across health, social care and housing that has a core care function. This discourse has some established and long-standing critics, such as Gilleard and Higgs, and yet the central question(s) a consumerist discourse raises remains surprisingly relevant today. The purpose of this forum article is to reconsider the viability of active agency amongst older people in the context of empirical research on information-giving across health, social care and housing that has been published since the paper by Gilleard and Higgs in 1998. Information-giving is the key consumer choice mechanism, and yet research is currently located in separate literatures. Giving these separate fields some coherence engages with and provides important empirical commentary. There is little or no evidence that information alone triggers active agency for older people in regard to their health, social care or housing. However, there is consistent evidence that discussion, deliberation and dialogue – or the practices associated with Habermas’ theory of communicative action – are desirable to older people in the context of active agency. More research is needed to demonstrate efficacy beyond communicative approaches being desirable.