Public lecture: University of Liverpool. Speaker: Dr Sam Carr, Reader, Department of Education and Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath
We often perceive older people as a generic group, but are they really? In fact, older people can range from as early as their 50s to their 90s and even extend into the centenarians. Who these older people are and what they need can be greatly diverse and even conflicting. If you are interested in ageing, ageism, care and retirement living, you should not miss the Centre for Ageing and the Life Course’s February seminar feature Dr Sam Carr on frailty and conflicting needs of older people in retirement communities.
This talk reports on qualitative data exploring the lived experiences of older people living in retirement villages across the United Kingdom and Australia. Dr Sam Carr will focus specifically on residents’ narratives, feelings and understanding of independence/dependence, and how these were specifically connected to retirement community living. The talk will unfold that residents held strikingly different and often competing needs and narratives around independence/dependence, sometimes creating a sense of “us” and “them” in the retirement community. The findings are discussed in relation (a) to the challenges such competing narratives create for retirement villages as living environments for a group of people who are far from homogenous, and (b) what they reveal about how older people experience (in)dependence.