Abstract
The primary focus of my paper is on understanding the aging experiences of people with disability, i.e., people ageing with disability. Why should that be important? Within the geriatric discourse, people with disabilities are largely overlooked and while disabilities have been looked at as resulting from the old age, there have hardly been any explorations of what it means for people living with pre-existing to disabilities to age. As argued by authors Putnam et al (2021), there is a need to disentangle ‘ageing with disability’ from ‘ageing into disability’ where disability is considered a natural part of the experience of getting old within the latter phenomenon. As people with pre-existing disabilities age, “ordinary functional decline due to natural ageing is superimposed on pre-existing dysfunction” and in many ways, they experience symptoms of aging even before they age (Lim 2022). I explore, through ethnographic vignettes of select participants from my doctoral fieldwork- their religious involvement and what it means for them as someone aging with disability acquired in early life. As people whose mobility gets impaired, how does this intersect with their religious participation? Within aging studies, mobility is often looked at as a feature commonly associated with old age but what happens when people with mobility impairment get older and engage with religion is what I explore in this paper.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Social and Cultural Perspectives on Aging
KEYWORDS
Disability, Ageing, Religion, Mobility Impairment
