CfP: Autumn 2025_#Ageing – Call for Papers
edited by Luis Freijo (King’s College London), Asja Makarević (Goethe University), and Belén Vidal (King’s College London)
This NECSUS Special Section invites submissions that engage with ageing in relation to the life cycles of human subjects. The section seeks bio-social, cultural, technological, philosophical and/or political reflections around questions of age and the ageing process through a critical focus on visual media that engages with this topic at the level of production, textuality and/or circulation.
While gerontology has experienced a cultural turn in the last decade (Twigg and Martin, 2015), ageing has been an object of enquiry in cultural theory for some time (e.g. Woodward 1999; Gullette 2004), with a particular focus on images and narratives of ageing and old age (e.g. Featherstone and Wernick, eds. 1995). In contrast, media scholars have been slower to turn their attention to ageing other than as a subset of gender studies and feminist theory, with early interventions by Simone de Beauvoir (in her book-length essay La Vieillesse/The Coming of Age, originally published in 1970) and Susan Sontag (“The Double Standard of Aging”, from 1972) often credited with opening the debate and providing inspiration in relation to methods (such as anocriticism or, the theorization of age/gender intersections, Haring 2023) and approaches to the ways in which we are “aged by culture,” as Margaret M. Gullette puts it in her 2004 book of the same title.
The intense public scrutiny (after the #blacklivesmatter and #metoo global movements) of the ways gendered and racial forms of discrimination have historically structured film and media has galvanized new waves of activist and critical thought on the relation between bodies, subjectivities and modes of agency. Once more, identities have been pushed to the critical centre stage. The deconstruction of ageism in visual culture is accruing urgency in a different way. Demographic trends signal the progressive ageing of the global population (the WHO predicts that “by 2030, 1 in 6 people in the world will be aged 60 years or over, and the number of persons aged 80 years or older is expected to triple between 2020 and 2050 to reach 426 million” (“Ageing and health”, www.who.int, 1/10/2022), giving ageing subjects a new visibility at the centre of policy and governance. Narratives of decline and the crisis of care dominate the news media coverage of topics related to the third and fourth ages, even if the experience and the social standing of the ageing subject varies widely according to factors such as cultural location, access to services and disposable income. Parallel to this state of affairs, film industries worldwide continue to trade in a visual economy normatively biased towards youth, even if in some regions (Europe most prominently) audiences are ageing in tune with demographic trends (with the long-term impact of the Covid pandemic and the expansion of streaming on the habits of older cinemagoers still under assessment).
This is just one of many paradoxes confronted by scholars concerned with the longer histories of representation and stereotyping of ageing in film and television (notably Cohen-Shalev 2009; Oró-Piqueras and Wohlmann 2016; Dolan 2017; Chivers 2019, or Tracy and Schrage-Früh 2021). New forms of theorisation (for example De Falco 2009; Gravagne 2013) point at the complex role of screen media as, in the words of Medina Bañón and Zecchi (2020), a technology of age, regulating and reproducing normative ideas about age and gender. In this regard, the focus on aging femininities has driven the critical agenda (e.g. see key studies by Dolan and Tincknell, 2012; Jermyn and Holmes 2015) while recent reports on gender inequality suggest that women remain mostly underrepresented in creative roles, such as film director, producer and screenwriter (Prommer and Loist 2020; Coles and Verhoeven 2021).
Conversely, some forms of film and media have become aligned with particular age groups; in this respect, more research is needed to debunk myths about social media being the preserve of those who have grown with it from a young age, while the intersections of ageing and celebrity cultures constitute an expanding field (cf Jermyn and Holmes 2015). Finally, ageing raises temporal questions of performance, creativity and late style (Bolton and Lobalzo Wright, 2016; Richardson 2019; Deng 2024) as part of wider cycles of maturity and obsolescence. Time entangles senescent creators and spectators in ways that lead us to ask how cinema and other forms of screen media registers age, and how it ages with its audiences.
We invite research contributions (including video essays) dealing with, but not limited to the following perspectives on #ageing:
- old age, third age, and fourth age in film and media
- performing and reading age in film and visual media
- narrating age
- transitions and ageing
- intergenerational relations
- ageing media/film cultures and industries
- intersectional approaches to ageing
- challenging narratives of decline
- critical approaches to successful aging
- ageing, illness, well-being
- dementia and time in film and media
- narratives of care
- old age and living arrangements on screen
- the care home in film and media
- old age and social media
- ageing in relation to stardom, celebrity, nostalgia and/or cinephilia
We look forward to receiving abstracts of 300 words, 3-5 bibliographic references, and a short biography of 100 words by 1 March 2025 via this online form. On the basis of selected abstracts, authors will be invited to submit full manuscripts by 15 July 2025 (5,000-8,000 words, revised abstract, 4-5 keywords) which will subsequently go through a blind peer review process before final acceptance for publication (expected December 2025). Please check the guidelines at: https://necsus-ejms.org/guidelines-for-submission/. For all queries on the call for papers and the submission of abstracts, please contact Belén Vidal at belen.vidal@kcl.ac.uk.
References
Anonymous. ‘Ageing and health’, World Health Organization, 1 October 2022 https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ageing-and-health
Bolton, Lucy and Julie Lobalzo Wright (eds.) 2016. Lasting Screen Stars. Images that Fade and Personas that Endure. London: Palgrave.
Chivers, Sally. 2019. The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Cohen-Shalev, Amir. 2009. Visions of Aging: Images of the Elderly in Film. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.
Coles, Amanda and Deb Verhoeven. 2021. Deciding on Diversity: Covid-19, Risk and Intersectional Inequality in the Canadian Film and Television Industry. Women in Film and Television Canada Coalition, Toronto.
De Beauvoir, Simone. 1972. The Coming of Age. London: Penguin.
Deng, MaoHui. 2024. Ageing, Dementia and Time in Film: Temporal Performances. Edinburgh University Press.
Dolan, Josephine and Estella Tincknell (eds.) 2012. Aging Femininities. Troubling Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Dolan, Josephine. 2017. Contemporary Cinema and ‘Old Age’: Gender and the Silvering of Stardom. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Featherstone and Wernick (eds.) 1995. Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life. New York: Routledge.
Gravagne, Pamela H. 2013. The Becoming of Age: Cinematic Visions of Mind, Body and Identity in Later Life. Jefferson: McFarland & Company.
Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. 2004. Aged by Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haring, Nicola. ‘Intersectional Ageing. An Anocritical Reading.’ 2023. In Nicole Haring, Roberta Maierhofer, Barbara Ratzenböck (eds.) Gender and Age/Aging in Popular Culture. Representations in Film, Music, Literature, and Social Media, 135-152. Aging Studies 22. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Jermyn, Deborah and Sue Holmes (eds.), 2015. Women, Celebrity, and Cultures of Ageing: Freeze Frame. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Medina Bañón, Raquel, and Barbara Zecchi. 2020. ‘Technologies of Age: The Intersection of Feminist Film Theory and Aging Studies’. Investigaciones Feministas 11 (2): 251–62. Oró-Piqueras, Maricel, and Anita Wolhmann (eds.) 2016. Serializing Age: Aging and Old Age in TV Series. Aging Studies 7. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Sontag, Susan. 1972. ‘The Double Standard of Aging.’ Saturday Review of the Society LV (39): 29–38.
Prommer E, and Skadi Loist. 2020. ‘Where are the Female Creatives? The Status Quo of the German Screen Industry’. Women in the International Film Industry: Policy, Practice and Power. Liddy S (ed.), 43–60. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke.
Richardson, Niall. 2019. Aging Femininity on Screen: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris.
Tracy, Tony and Michaela Schrage-Früh (eds.) 2022. Ageing Masculinities in Contemporary European and Anglophone Cinema. London, New York: Routledge.
Twigg, Julia and Wendy Martin (eds.) 2015. Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology. London, New York: Routledge.
Woodward, Kathleen (ed.) 1999. Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.