ABSTRACT
This chapter examines horizons of pandemics, structural vulnerability, suffering and struggle, and resilience of older persons and communities in the contexts of human contributions to subversion of the older public’s health as public good and forms of persistent injustice. The first-person perspectives of one public health law and gerontological social work and psychological phenomenological research scholar, who led the development of the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA) Health Law Section Covid-19 Report, and two attorney-bioethicists, inform the development of a critical reflective praxis of phenomenology in seeking to understand threats to the older public’s health and social welfare in pandemic environments. Drawing on NYSBA Task Force Reports addressing Covid-19 pandemic policy issues as well as other evidence, the authors provide a critical theoretical analysis of psychology’s complicity in theorizing “successful aging” as an individual project embedded in market ideology that marginalizes older persons’ experience and full participation in the public’s health as a pillar of participatory democracy. The chapter advances phenomenology as a critical theoretical framework, method, and reflective praxis for deepening understanding of the experience and meanings of growing old across diverse social and cultural contexts, and challenges notions of individual success in a decontextualized world, with a particular focus on the systematic marginalization of suffering, finitude, and the personhood and dignity of older persons. Paradigmatic examples of older persons’ lived-through experience are presented as evidence that counters the logic of “successful aging” as idea, theory, and process. A critical reflective praxis of phenomenology as enacted activism in service of elder justice is offered as an alternative to a totalizing theory of “successful aging” with important implications for participatory democracy.
