New Challenges to Ageing in the Rural North: A Critical Interdisciplinary Perspective

This book provides an underexplored view of ageing, one that conceives older people as valuable resources in their communities, as active citizens with both voice, and an agency that includes the capacity for resistance. It acknowledges that becoming old with dignity means also paying attention to caring, good health services and the possibility of good death. The book defines age and ageing as multiple, culturally and historically constructed phenomena that are only loosely connected to the years of one’s life. In focusing on the peripheral North located in the Nordic, Canadian and Russian north, it highlights important questions and viewpoints that can be found and adapted to other rural areas. The book answers the following questions: What is the relevance of legislation and international legal agreements in ensuring the rights of elderly people under political and economic changes? What challenges do geographic isolation, changing age structure, and cultural and ecological transformations pose to possibilities for meeting older people’s needs for engagement in society as well as for their care? As such this book will be of interest to all those working in population aging.

About the Author

Päivi Naskali is a Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Lapland. She is a head of the Finnish University Network of Gender Studies, has worked actively in the National Doctoral School in Gender Studies and edited the Journal of Women’s Studies. Her research interests include gender and ageing in the times of neoliberalism, educational gender politics and feminist pedagogy and philosophy. She has lately been leading a research project The Arctic Change and Elderly Exclusion: A Gender-based Perspective.

Joan R. Harbison is an Adjunct Professor at Dalhousie University School of Social Work. Her work includes interdisciplinary approaches to research in the fields of ageing, health, and social service delivery. She has published in numerous national and international texts and journals and contributed to many scholarly international, interdisciplinary, development and research projects. Recently she authored the text Contesting Elder Abuse and Neglect: Ageism, Risk, and the Rhetoric of Rights in the Mistreatment of Older People, University of British Columbia Press, Fall, 2016, in collaboration with her interdisciplinary research team from law, sociology and social work.

Shahnaj Begum is a Post-doctoral researcher at the Unit for Gender Studies in the Faculty of Education of the University of Lapland. Her research focuses on Northern elderly well-being and gender issues in the context of Arctic change. She is a member of the University of the Arctic Thematic Network of Health and Well being in the Arctic.