The event will be hybrid. Please register by writing to korsbaek@cas.au.dk to get the zoom link. You are also very welcome to join the seminar at Moesgård (4235, 133).

Abstract:

Aglaia Chatjouli

Assistant Professor, Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean, Principal Investigator BIO-AGE Research Project (https://bio-age.weebly.com/).

Title: On the poetics of aging in the pandemic context. Reflections from the Greek ethnographic context.

The pandemic has led to worldwide reconfigurations causing multiple, immediate, and long-term effects in everyday and institutional life. Even though a lot has been said and done regarding the elderly, little we know about their own perspectives and experiences. With our research project BIO-AGE - The biosocial experience of aging during the COVID 19 pandemic, we aspire to shed light exactly into elderly experience during the pandemic era in relation to the Greek context. This is achieved via methodologically focusing, on the one hand, on the experiences of the elderly as well as biomedical staff, care workers and experts, and, on the other hand, on the mapping of formal state and biomedical discourses and practices as they construct life with/after COVID-19. We have met and interviewed elders in neighborhoods in 3 Greek towns; we have conducted fieldwork in care homes; we have investigated public institutions providing care to the elderly and we have met and interviewed experts in biomedical and geriatric care provision.

In Greece as elsewhere the pandemic brought to the spotlight of public and private, biomedical and political attention and tension, our elder co-civilians and related issues of vulnerability, responsibility and care, primarily framed via biomedical risk discourses. In the context of our research, we actually trace a multiplicity of experiences and conceptualisations regarding risk, responsibility and vulnerability, as well as continuities and discontinuities in care formulations. In that respect, I wish to highlight processes of the biosocial poetics of aging through the prism of aging and care during the pandemic era characterised of a multiplicity which underlines the invalidity of reducing aging and age-related vulnerability to the aging biologized body, as well as the restrictive potential of homogenising elders based on age-related (biologized) vulnerability. As key trajectories intertwined in the poetics of aging in the pandemic context, I argue are the ways that biomedicalized representations and often prevailing ageist discourses, predominant in formal care initiatives, are variously reformulated in everyday praxis, whereby top-down and bottom-up conceptualizations are (re)negotiated, and even more emphatically, in the spaces, materialities and relations of care.