This book provides the first foundation of knowledge about the intellectual traditions, contemporary scope and future prospects for the interdisciplinary field of rural gerontology. With a focus on rural regions, small towns and villages, which have the highest rates of population ageing worldwide, Rural Gerontology is aimed at understanding what it means for rural people, communities and institutions to be at the forefront of twenty-first-century demographic change. The book offers important insights from rural ageing studies into today's most pressing gerontological problems. With chapters from more than 65 established and emerging rural ageing researchers, it is the first synthesis of knowledge about rural gerontology, harnessing a burgeoning interdisciplinary scholarship on the rural dimensions of ageing, old age and older populations. With a view to advancing a critical understanding of rural ageing populations, this book will have an overreaching impact across the social sciences by drawing on advancements in understandings of rural ageing from social, environmental, geographical and critical gerontology to facilitate a comprehensive exploration of the diversity, complexity and implications of the ageing process in rural settings. Bringing together valuable international perspectives, this book makes a timely contribution to gerontology, rural studies and the social sciences, and will appeal to scholars and researchers across USA and Canada, UK and Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, Europe, China and countries in Africa, South America and South-East Asia.
Author(s): Mark Skinner, Rachel Winterton
Series: Perspectives on Rural Policy and Planning
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 394
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Notes on contributors
Preface
Part I Introduction
1 Introducing rural gerontology
Part II Interdisciplinary foundations
2 Demographic ageing and rural population change
3 Rural studies of ageing
4 Rural health and ageing: making way for a critical gerontology of rural health
5 Critical human ecology and global contexts of rural ageing
6 Critical social gerontology and rural ageing
Part III Contemporary scope
7 Rural ageing in low- and middle-income countries
8 Rural women, ageing and retirement
9 Rural-urban migration of older people: mobility, adaptation and accessibility
10 Policy and program challenges in delivering health and social care services to rural older people
11 Rural ageing, housing and homelessness
12 Rural ageing and transportation: how a lack of transportation options can leave older rural populations stranded
13 Rural community development in an era of population ageing
14 Making rural communities age-friendly: issues and challenges
15 Rural ageing in place and place attachment
16 Place-bound rural community of older men: social and autobiographical insideness of the Mill Village Boys in Finland
17 Social relations, connectivity and loneliness of older rural people
18 Understanding and performing care in rural contexts in Central Europe
Part IV Emerging critical perspectives
19 Postcolonial perspectives on rural ageing in (South) Africa: gendered vulnerabilities and intergenerational ambiguities of older African women
20 Posthumanist traditions and their possibilities for rural gerontology
21 A Deweyan pragmatist perspective on rural gerontology
22 Interrogating the nature and meaning of social exclusion for rural dwelling older people
23 Defining the relationship between active citizenship and rural healthy ageing: a critical perspective
24 A critical view of older voluntarism in ageing rural communities: prospect, precarity and global pandemics
25 Older people and poverty: making critical connections in rural places
26 Critical perspectives on mental health, dementia and rural ageing
27 Rural gerontechnology: arts-based insights into rural ageing and the use of technology
28 Rural older people, climate change and disasters
Part V Conclusion
29 Towards a critical rural gerontology
Index
