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;
- Aspects of the Life Course: the meaning of age: the nature and meaning of life stages: childhood, adulthood, old age in historical, literary and philosophical perspectives; the life course in history, in art, in the life-sciences; images of human life: from ‘life cycle’ to ‘life course’ to ‘trajectories’; pathways in the life course: to work, to family formation, to resignation, to metamorphosis
- Childhood, Adulthood, Old Age: changing parameters of ‘youth’ in modernity: how and why? ‘the child’ through prisms of the arts and the sciences; the ‘end of childhood’ thesis; does it hold? what is an ‘adult’? Can ‘adulthood’ be defined, and if so, how? How is it represented? reflections of – and on – ‘young’ in literature and art (including music); images of old age in art; wisdom and old age: fact or fiction? old age as metapho
- Generations: collective trauma and ‘historical generations’ (e.g. ‘The Great Depression’); generations X, Y, Z – and…?; relationships among age-groups: through affection, authority, habit, need…? The ‘generation gap’: what (and where) is it? filial relations through the life course; health and illness across generations: who takes care of whom, and when?
Related themes will also be identified for development and exploration. Out of our deliberations it is anticipated that a series of related cross-context research projects will develop.

Entries (RSS)