Times of our Lives: Growing Up, Growing Old

This inter-disciplinary research and publications project examines the idea and meaning of the human ‘life course’. We age from the moment we are born. The changes we undergo are complex, multifaceted and, above all, inevitable. From a biological perspective, these changes follow a broad pattern that applies to everyone (the exceptions being regarded as abnormal). However, human development does not happen in the body alone; it happens in life, in the bio-social sphere that is our natural habitat. The developmental sequence which is known as the ‘life-course’ does have physiological bench-marks that both enable and constrain action, but its nature and the significance of its phases depend on how the typical events of the life span are interpreted by culture and understood by individuals.

Making Sense Of: Growing Up, Growing Old as a continuing project seeks to bring together varied approaches to the study and contemplation of the life-course, the aim being the establishment of a forum for conversations among disciplines and areas of interest. All manner of dialogue will be encouraged: for example, researchers in the field of childhood and old age, say, could explore and discuss literary and psychiatric approaches and, perhaps, find common ground; or, historians might confer about adolescence and senescence in the same breath, as it were, along the way generating new insights about the changing vicissitudes of the human condition; and so on.

The project will seek to explore the following themes;