Jeff Hearn

Age and Ageing

Age is a fundamental social division and way of organising, socially and societally. When talking of age, there is often a quick movement to either the young or the old, or simply younger or older people. Yet age and ageing affect everyone, even those who appear age-unmarked or less age-marked. I became interested in age, initially from one set of work on children, childcare provision, and child abuse, and then from another cluster on bringing age into studies of men and masculinities. The first was influenced by both long-term childcare campaigning and teaching social workers and community workers; the second arose from some frustration with studies on men and masculinities that often seemed to limit their attention to the ages of about 16 to 35. Over the last 30 or more years my interest has moved more directly to ageism, older age, later life, and death, particularly in relation to organisations – and this is what Wendy Parkin and I wrote about in the book, Age at Work, published in 2021. Such issues and many other themes around age and gender also figure in a different way in the 15-year long collective memory group with older broadly profeminist men that I was part of and which produced the book, Men’s Stories for a Change: Ageing Men Remember, published in 2016. More recently, I have been working with various colleagues, especially Charlotta Niemistö and Hanna Sjögren, on policy issues around older people, including the impact of digitalisation on services and care for older people.

Selected Works

  1. Birth and Afterbirth: A Materialist Account, Achilles’ Heel, London, 1983. Link
  2. ‘Child abuse: violences and sexualities towards young people’, Sociology, Vol. 22(4), 1988, pp. 531–544 (first published article in ‘Commentary’ section). Link
  3. ‘Child abuse, social theory and everyday state practices’, with Wendy Parkin, in Joe Hudson and Burt Galaway (eds.) The State as Parent: International Research Perspectives on Interventions with Young Persons, Kluwer, Dordecht, Netherlands, 1989, pp. 229-236. Link
  4. ‘The Transatlantic gaze: masculinities, youth and the American Imaginary’, with Antonio Melechi, in Steve Craig (ed.), Men, Masculinity and the Media, Sage, Newbury Park, Ca., 1992, pp. 215–232. Link.
  5. ‘Imaging the aging of men’, in Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick (eds.), Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, Routledge, London, 1995, pp. 97–115. Link
  6. ‘Ageism, violence and abuse: theoretical and practical perspectives on the links between child abuse and elder abuse’, in The Violence Against Children Study Group Children, Child Abuse and Child Protection: Placing Children Centrally, John Wiley, London, 1999, pp. 81-96.
  7. ‘What is child protection? Historical and methodological issues in comparative research on Lastensuojelu / child protection’, with Tarja Pösö, Carole Smith, Susan White and Johanna Korpinen, International Journal of Social Welfare, Vol. 13(1), 2004, pp. 28–41. Link
  8. ‘From older men to boys: Masculinity theory and the life course(s)’, NORMA: Nordic Journal of Masculinity Studies, Vol. 2(1), 2007, pp. 79-84. Link
  9. ‘Older men, ageing and power: Masculinities theory and alternative spatialised theoretical perspectives’, with Linn Sandberg, Sextant: Revue du Groupe Interdisciplinaire D’Etudes sur les Femmes et le Genre (Journal of Women’s Studies) (Belgium), Vol. 27, 2009, pp. 147-163. Link
  10. ‘Doing memory work with older men: the practicalities, the process, the potential’, with Vic Blake, Richard Johnson, David Jackson, Randy Barber and Zbyszek Luczynski, Working with Older People, Vol. 20(4), 2016, pp. 209–213. Link
  11. ‘Ageing, gender politics and masculinities: Reflections on collective memory work with older men’, with Vic Blake, David Jackson, Randy Barber, Richard Johnson and Zbyszek Luczynski, Working with Older People, Vol. 22(2), 2018, pp. 93-100. Link
  12. ‘Collective memory work with older men: Ageing, gender politics and masculinities’, with Vic Blake, David. Jackson, Randy Barber, Richard. Johnson and Zbyszek Luczynski, in Robert Hamm (ed.) Reader Collective Memory-Work ebook, Beltra Book, Sligo, 2021, pp. 327-353. 978-0-9928271-4-4 Link; Link
  13. ‘Hegemonic digitalisation in policy on older people: The Finnish case and wider social implications’, with C. Niemistö and H. Sjögren, Sociological Review, 2026.