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. Yet age and ageing affects everyone, even those who appear age-unmarked or less age-marked. I become interested in age, initially from one set of work on children, childcare provision, and child abuse, and another set on bringing age into studies of men and masculinities. The first was influenced by both long-term childcare campaigning and teaching social workers; the second arose from frustration with studies on men and masculinities that often seemed to limit their attention to the ages of about 16 to 30. Over the last twenty or more years my interest has moved more directly to older age, later life, and death – and this is what Wendy Parkin and I wrote about in the book, Age at Work.

Selected Works

  1. Birth and Afterbirth: A Materialist Account, Achilles Heel, London, 1983.
  2. ‘Child abuse: violences and sexualities towards young people’, Sociology, Vol. 22(4), 1988, pp. 531-544 (first published article in ‘Commentary’ section).
  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.
  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.
  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.
  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.
  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