Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Brazil

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Brazil
Author: Marília Duque
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2022-04-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1787359964
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With people living longer all over the world, ageing has been framed as a socio-economic problem. In Brazil, older people are expected to remain healthy and autonomous while actively participating in society. Based on ethnographic research in São Paulo, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Brazil shows how older people in a middle-class neighbourhood conciliate these expectations with the freedom and pleasures reserved for the Third Age. Work is what bonds this community together, providing a sense of dignity and citizenship. Smartphones have become of great importance to the residents as they search for and engage in new forms of work and hobbies. Connected by a digital network, they work as content curators, sharing activities that fill their schedule. Managing multiple WhatsApp groups is a job in itself, as well as a source of solidarity and hope. Friendship groups help each to download new apps, search for medical information and guidance, and navigate the city. Together, they are reinventing themselves as volunteers, entrepreneurs and influencers, or they are finding a new interest that gives their later life a purpose. The smartphone, which enables the residents to share and discuss their busy lives, is also helping them, and us, to rethink the very representation of ageing.

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Brazil

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Brazil
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN: 9781800083387
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With people living longer all over the world, ageing has been framed as a socio-economic problem. In Brazil, older people are expected to remain healthy and autonomous while actively participating in society. Based on ethnographic research in São Paulo, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Brazil shows how older people in a middle-class neighbourhood conciliate these expectations with the freedom and pleasures reserved for the Third Age. Work is what bonds this community together, providing a sense of dignity and citizenship. Smartphones have become of great importance to the residents as they search for and engage in new forms of work and hobbies. Connected by a digital network, they work as content curators, sharing activities that fill their schedule. Managing multiple WhatsApp groups is a job in itself, as well as a source of solidarity and hope. Friendship groups help each to download new apps, search for medical information and guidance, and navigate the city. Together, they are reinventing themselves as volunteers, entrepreneurs and influencers, or they are finding a new interest that gives their later life a purpose. The smartphone, which enables the residents to share and discuss their busy lives, is also helping them, and us, to rethink the very representation of ageing.

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy
Author: SHIREEN. WALTON
Publisher:
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-05
Genre: Aging
ISBN: 9781787359734
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An anthropological account of the experience of age and ageing in an inner-city neighborhood in Milan. This book is an anthropological account of the experience of age and ageing in an inner-city neighborhood in Milan, exploring the relationship between ageing and technology amidst a backdrop of rapid global technological innovation, including the advent of mobile health, smart cities, and a number of wider socioeconomic and technological transformations. Through extensive urban and digital ethnographic research in Milan, Shireen Walton shows how the smartphone has become a "constant companion" in contemporary life, accompanying people throughout the day and through individual and collective experiences. The volume argues that ageing with smartphones in the contemporary urban Italian context is about living with ambiguity, change, and contradiction, as well as developing curiosities about a changing world, our changing selves, and changing relationships with others.

Aspiring in Later Life

Aspiring in Later Life
Author: Megha Amrith
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2023-07-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1978830424
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In our highly interconnected and globalized world, people often pursue their aspirations in multiple places. Yet in public and scholarly debates, aspirations are often seen as the realm of younger, mobile generations, since they are assumed to hold the greatest potential for shaping the future. This volume flips this perspective on its head by exploring how aspirations are constructed from the vantage point of later life, and shows how they are pursued across time, space, and generations. The aspirations of older people are diverse, and relate not only to aging itself but also to planning the next generation’s future, preparing an "ideal" retirement, searching for intimacy and self-realization, and confronting death and afterlives. Aspiring in Later Life brings together rich ethnographic cases from different regions of the world, offering original insights into how aspirations shift over the course of life and how they are pursued in contexts of translocal mobility. This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.​ Download the open access book here.

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy
Author: Shireen Walton
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2021-05-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1787359719
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‘Who am I at this (st)age? Where am I and where should I be, and how and where should I live?’ These questions, which individuals ask themselves throughout their lives, are among the central themes of this book, which presents an anthropological account of the everyday experiences of age and ageing in an inner-city neighbourhood in Milan, and in places and spaces beyond. Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy explores ageing and digital technologies amidst a backdrop of rapid global technological innovation, including mHealth (mobile health) and smart cities, and a number of wider socio-economic and technological transformations that have brought about significant changes in how people live, work and retire, and how they communicate and care for each other. Based on 16 months of urban digital ethnographic research in Milan, the smartphone is shown to be a ‘constant companion’ in, of and for contemporary life. It accompanies people throughout the day and night, and through individual and collective experiences of movement, change and rupture. Smartphone practices tap into and reflect the moral anxieties of the present moment, while posing questions related to life values and purpose, identities and belonging, privacy and sociability. Through her extensive investigation, Shireen Walton argues that ageing with smartphones in this contemporary urban Italian context is about living with ambiguity, change and contradiction, as well as developing curiosities about a changing world, our changing selves, and changing relationships with and to others. Ageing with smartphones is about figuring out how best to live together, differently.

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile
Author: Alfonso Otaegui
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2023-03-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1800084625
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What does it mean to be ageing in Chile as a migrant? What does it mean to be late middle-aged nowadays? How does living half of your life in a foreign country impact perspectives on later life? Is retirement an opportunity to go back to the home country? What will happen to the next generation, raised in a different country from their parents? Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Chile analyses the experience of ageing for Peruvian migrants aged around 60, who have lived in Chile for over 20 years. Their lives are informed by a series of experiences of being in between. They live between two countries, two generations (their Peruvian parents and their Chilean children), two different stages in life (retained youth and menacing old age), between giving care (to their parents) and not wanting care (from their children) and between a continuing legacy (through their children, who have a promising future) and not transmitting legacy (some traditions will not pass on to the next generation). Peruvian migration has been one of the most studied in Chile. However, neither the experience of ageing of migrants in Chile nor the experience of late middle age has been fully addressed yet. By focusing on the entanglement of ageing, migration and technology, this monograph is an ethnographic contribution to an unexplored subject in the vast literature on migration studies in Chile.

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban China

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban China
Author: Xinyuan Wang
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2023-09-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1800084102
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If we want to understand contemporary China, the key is through understanding the older generation. This is the generation in China whose life courses almost perfectly synchronised with the emergence and growth of the ‘New China’ under the rule of the Communist Party (1949). People in their 70s and 80s have double the life expectancy of their parents’ generation. The current eldest generation in Shanghai was born in a time when the average household could not afford electric lights, but today they can turn their lights off via their smartphone apps. Based on 16-month ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban China tackles the intersection between the ‘two revolutions’ experienced by the older generation in Shanghai: the contemporary smartphone-based digital revolution and the earlier communist revolutions. We find that we can only explain the smartphone revolution if we first appreciate the long-term consequences of these people’s experiences during the communist revolutions. The context of this book is a wide range of drastic social transformations in China, from the Cultural Revolution to the individualism and Confucianism in Digital China. Supported by detailed ethnographic material, the observations and analysis provide a panorama view of the social landscape of contemporary China, including topics such as the digital and everyday life, ageing and healthcare, intergenerational relations and family development, community building and grassroots organizations, collective memories and political attitudes among ordinary Chinese people.

The Global Smartphone

The Global Smartphone
Author: Daniel Miller
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2021-05-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1787359611
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The smartphone is often literally right in front of our nose, so you would think we would know what it is. But do we? To find out, 11 anthropologists each spent 16 months living in communities in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, focusing on the take up of smartphones by older people. Their research reveals that smartphones are technology for everyone, not just for the young. The Global Smartphone presents a series of original perspectives deriving from this global and comparative research project. Smartphones have become as much a place within which we live as a device we use to provide ‘perpetual opportunism’, as they are always with us. The authors show how the smartphone is more than an ‘app device’ and explore differences between what people say about smartphones and how they use them. The smartphone is unprecedented in the degree to which we can transform it. As a result, it quickly assimilates personal values. In order to comprehend it, we must take into consideration a range of national and cultural nuances, such as visual communication in China and Japan, mobile money in Cameroon and Uganda, and access to health information in Chile and Ireland – all alongside diverse trajectories of ageing in Al Quds, Brazil and Italy. Only then can we know what a smartphone is and understand its consequences for people’s lives around the world.

How to Live Through a Pandemic

How to Live Through a Pandemic
Author: Simone Abram
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2023-09-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000883124
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This book explores what anthropology can contribute to an understanding of how people live through pandemics. It reflects on how pandemics are experienced and what we can learn from Covid-19 as well as previous instances that might inform future responses and help to alleviate suffering. The chapters highlight current research and longer-term reflections from different countries and areas of the discipline, covering medical anthropology, care and surveillance, digital and experimental ethnography, and the everyday economies of lockdown. They show the breadth and originality of anthropological work relevant to thinking about and responding to pandemic situations. Extending beyond Covid-19, the volume considers the implications for ongoing and future research under pandemic restrictions and gives a broad overview of current anthropology relevant to questions about pandemics. It will be of interest to both academic and applied anthropologists, as well as to sociologists and those working in global and public health.