Decolonizing Gerontology through Inside-out Research and Practice Paper presented for the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in 2022 (original) (raw)

The professional fields of gerontology and geriatrics rely on a cultural construct that growing “old” signals a shift from adult independence to child-like dependence, coupled with the loss of “productive” social roles. They have created a professional landscape of frail, dependent “others” who require intervention once reaching threshold ages, such as 60 or 65. In the gerontological imagination, older adults serve as an embodiment of irrevocable decline into disability, disease, frailty, and death. Profit off this landscape comes through grant proposals, training programs, and service provision. Population aging statistics are associated with natural disaster (e.g. silver tsnunami), warning of threat to informal (family) and public (social welfare) systems). The perceptions, creative adaptations, and agency of people as they age past mature adulthood are lost in the presumption that the gerontological role is to assess, intervene, and problem-solve – and rescue. Prolonged ethnographic fieldwork, however, contributes to decolonization of this discourse and of expert intervention by unsettling ethnocentric presumptions of gerontological constructs, documenting cross cultural variation in how people navigate aging as part of lived experience, and privileging lived expertise over professional assessment. This paper contributes to decolonizing gerontology through presenting from an ongoing research study in a Midwestern Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC), which began in December, 2020. This is an intersectional study comparing gerontological and local constructions of “getting old,” which one resident defined as a boundary crossed, “when you are no longer the person you prepared yourself to be.” The CCRC is designed like a rural college campus, and is divided into “independent living” (average age is 81) and “assisted living” (average age is 88). Each month, on average, 1-4 people move in and 1-4 people move out (usually through death). Most residents identify as white, Christian, heterosexual, cisgender, and affluent. While intersectionality theory can importantly examine the intersection of oppressed identities (Crenshaw 1989), this study questions how people who identify as highly privileged confront the stigmatized losses and vulnerabilities of aging within a highly gendered and heteronormative context. As an “inside-out” (Riles, 2000) study, this 16-month ethnographic field project documents variations in experience of disabilities, disease, and decline that, in turn, bring varied responses to “getting old” as a personal and community-wide problem. Getting “outside” gerontological constructs of aging requires first engaging residents in their own constructions, and then inviting them to compare their experience with their encounters with gerontological and geriatric professionals. Another inside-out dimension in this research is to share emergent findings and invite dialogue with residents. This process has provided a culturally resonant way to mutually confront ageism and ableism, and inspired residents to pursue their own interventions of mutual support. This paper uses study results to argue how gerontology can be addressed as a colonizing enterprise and how anthropological research can provide an unsettling response. It also describes a practical outcome, which has been resident driven intervention to break their silence of internalized ageism and ableism despite socialization to keep such troubles private.