More-than-representational approaches to the life-course

Abstract

This paper proposes bringing together work on the life-course and more-than-representational theories as one way to extend and complement current approaches to ageing research. Drawing on ethnographic research with older people in Manchester, UK, I argue that research on ageing should better foreground those less-tangible, temporal dynamics of experience which are often overlooked. Understanding the life-course through more-than-representational theories complicates any clear sense of chronological time, illuminating the ways in which the life-course mediates the present in unexpected and expected ways. Specifically, I foreground differentiated capacities to affect and be affected across places, times and individual life-courses. This framing not only disrupts reductive narratives of older age, but also shows how more-than-representational theories are important to thinking about temporality. Through accounts developed with older people, rather than on them, I demonstrate the ways in which the identities and stories encountered are mediated by the research context. Future research on ageing must foreground the multiplicities and practices of older peoples’ embodied experience whilst keeping sight of the performative effects of representations. There is a need to more-thoroughly explore the overlaps between more-than-representational theories and the life-course to further develop relational geographies of ageing.