This workshop occurs on March 26 and April 2, 2021. 

Register here: https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/creees/aging-workshop

The history of old age is a growing field of inquiry, yet scholars have mostly examined aging in the context of Western capitalist societies. This workshop hopes to bring together a number of early career academics and graduate students to discuss their research on old age under socialism. There has been a great deal of interest, in recent years, in how socialist societies imagined gender, healthcare, and the family. This is granting us a much fuller picture of these societies than was possible during the Cold War itself, when analysis focused squarely on themes of political oppression and resistance. Some of these societies, for instance in Eastern and Central Europe, were, demographically, quite old, often because many young people had been killed in war or had fled to the West. Others, such as China and Vietnam, were a demographic transition that entailed lower birth rates and higher life expectancy. And yet we know next to nothing about the socialist style of aging: the imagination of age, and the policy apparatus. This seems like an especially important research field, just now, given that societies all over the world will be tasked with reimagining old age in the twenty-first century.