Published papers

Children’s literature is inherently a dialogue between child and adult, or more broadly, those at different stages of the life course. Bringing age studies and studies of children’s literature together, this article considers how children’s literature depicts and explores age stages and intergenerationality, focusing on the role of the garden in this. In children’s literature, the garden often functions as a meeting place for the child and the older adult, a space that is associated with, and activates assumptions about, both childhood and older age. To explore this potential, we examine three contemporary picturebooks in English that depict an intergenerational relationship between a child(ren) and a grandparent, and include a garden central to the narrative: Roxane Marie Galliez and Seng Soun Ratanavanh’s Time for Bed, Miyuki (2017), Allan Ahlberg and Gillian Tyler’s The Snail House (2000) and Lizzy Stewart’s There’s a Tiger in the Garden (2016). As our analysis demonstrates, they represent the garden as a liminal space, where the associations with childhood and older age are mobilised in ways that both reinforce and challenge age norms and stereotypes as well as the dichotomous view of age stages.

With its potential to engage a large audience and mark emerging social tendencies and with the rich narrative space that the seriality can bring, TV series can be a valuable cultural site through which to explore ageing as an experience in time. The Netflix's longest-running TV series Grace and Frankie (2015–2022) exhibits such potential, bringing together ageing and friendship into the popular cultural domain. Set in the contemporary US, the show closely follows two over-70, newly divorced, female protagonists and friends, Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin). Depicting the new opportunities and experiences they gain and drawing on the star persona of Fonda and Tomlin, the show presents an optimistic narrative of ageing into old age. This optimism, however, is more ambivalent about ageing than it appears, as it emerges from the context of the neoliberalization of ageing in the US and other Western societies. Considering friendship, entrepreneurship, the ageing woman's body and sexuality, and care in the show, we demonstrate how the show's optimism is premised on the construction of the neoliberal, successfully ageing subject in the two protagonists and on the othering of the fourth age, “‘black hole’ of ageing,” as a time and space marked by the failing of the body, vulnerability and dependency (Higgs & Gilleard, 2015, 16). While the show's explicit engagement with the bodily ageing in some ways makes it more relevant to older audience, its evocation of the fourth age reflects and reinforces the broader cultural anxiety around it. Ultimately, the show brings in the fourth age only to reiterate the two protagonists' credentials as successful agers.

© 2020, The Author(s). It is estimated that a third of children know someone living with dementia, and there are now many picturebooks for young children that help to explain the changes dementia can bring to family life. Despite their number, there has been little examination of what these books communicate about health and illness. To address this, the current study presents a close visual and textual analysis of 10 recent picturebooks in English that aim to teach children about dementia. Our analysis reveals that in these books dementia is exclusively framed in terms of ageing, and as an illness of older adults. Furthermore, the books rely heavily on mechanistic metaphors to explain the causes of dementia. However, at the same time the “still the same person” narrative is dominant. This narrative emphasises the importance of foregrounding the unique history and personality of the person living with dementia, and offers a way to help children to continue meaningful relationships with their relatives. These books employ often ageist tropes of decline in the depiction of dementia and yet at the same time support a narrative of ongoing personhood, reflecting the complexity of broader social discourses around dementia and selfhood.