Abstract
Turkey, as a country reflecting the socio-economic peculiarities of the global south, is going through a unique demographic process with its unprecedentedly decreasing birth rates for a developing country and rapidly aging population, which have limited accesses to related social services and social policy applications.As a belated modern milieu, which is not isolated from the neoliberal processes along the axis of sociocultural domains, it appears to be Turkey’s senior citizens too is left with no choice to but maintain a “successful aging” process in light of the medicalization of everyday life and responsibility attributed to the self-creating individual. Moreover, the pandemic has also complicated the positionality of these senior citizens in the eyes of public in and through failed, populist-minded public health policies, which have undermined the respected status of many segments in the traditionalist Middle East culture. In our paper, we seek answers for various question obtained from field of sociology of health by relying on empirical evidence derived from the field of social work as well as public discourses reflected on various media sources. In this manner, we map the lifeworld of seniors, their changing perceptions on public health policies and social services through the prism of class, gender, and social policy.
Presenters
Poyraz KolluogluAssistant Professor, Social work, Istanbul Aydin University, Turkey Melek Ipek
Istanbul Aydin University
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Social and Cultural Perspectives on Aging
KEYWORDS
Turkey, Successful aging, Medicalization, Neoliberalism, Social services
