ABSTRACT
As austerity policies in many countries make ‘ageing-in-place’ both an ideal and a central public health strategy, the topographies of ageing have shifted. Examining the local details of ageing – its terrain, shape and features – reveals the heterogeneous materialisation processes that come into play in enacting that ideal. New digital devices are not just assistive or compensating but contribute to new responsibilisations for health and safety, new ways of ‘doing age’ and new materialisations of ‘home’. To explore these reconfigured and reconfiguring topographies, I suggest a new materialist-inspired understanding of these entanglements of different agents involved, including (but not limited to) technologies, spaces, users, carers and sociocultural ideals of good ageing. I argue that mapping those topographies as ‘conditions of possibilities’ can illuminate the complexities of opportunities, risks and inequalities that phenomena like ‘ageing-in-place’ may bring into play.
