Linking Ages - The Material-Discursive Practices of Un/Doing Age across the Life Course

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Age is one of the key markers that greatly influence how a person is treated in our societies. From a sociological perspective of un/doing age, age boundaries can be understood as practical accomplishments – not something people are or do, but something that is being done through material-discursive boundary-making practices. State-of-the-art research has studied the (material) bodies, spaces and things as well as the associated (discoursive) representations - or dispositifs – that un/do age(ing), but faces two crucial limitations: first, it lacks comprehensive theorising of the fact that age, unlike gender, is a continuous, processual and dynamic marker of social difference; and second, the absence of dialogue between childhood, youth, adulthood and age studies causes a struggle to create knowledge that exceeds age boundaries and risks reifying age categories instead of deconstructing them. To close these research gaps, the projects aims to develop such an urgently needed meta-perspective towards age as a category of social difference manifested in a framework of ‘Linking Ages’ to bring theories, methodologies and findings from childhood, youth, adulthood and age studies into a dialogue. As a reflexive poststructuralist approach such a practice-theoretical framework does not aim to compare what life stages are, but how they come into being – and which role research itself plays in that process -, asking: How is age being un/done in different life stages? Which material-discursive practices draw age boundaries across the life course?The ‘Linking Ages’ framework will be inductively established from seven empirical research projects (one postdoctoral, four PhD projects, two MA projects). All involved projects ask how, not why, age is constituted, and in doing so focus on selected materiel elements of practices – bodies, things or spaces – as well as the associated discursive elements and their materialisations in regulations and representations. In doing so projects focus on at least two life stages, starting with childhood and later life in the first cohort and include adulthood into the analyses of the second cohort. All projects deploy practice-theoretical multi-method research designs that account for both material and discursive elements and thus combine ‘material’ methods (e.g. ethnography, artefact analysis) with textual methods (e.g. interviews, documents). Located at a meta-level, the group leader’s project analyses the role that research itself plays in the un/doings of age through explicit and implicit knowledge practices. It brings together findings from all sub-projects, maps them using situational analysis, and, on this basis, constitutes the practice-theoretical ‘Linking Ages’ framework.