ABSTRACT
Far from referring just to the chronological order of years since birth, age is a decisive marker of identity across the life course, and like gender and ethnicity, it is a structural and powerful organizational principle of social life. In particular, age is a key feature of social allocation for both children and older people: Children are constructed as “not yet belonging”, and older people as “no longer belonging”, to the realms of adult maturity and decisional power. Yet those at the two ends of life span, the young and the old, are subject to diverse age-related concepts which are often discussed separately in their respective research fields. In this chapter, we bring together the concepts of childism, adultism and generationing from childhood research and the concepts of ageism and age as doing from ageing research. We discuss what these concepts capture when age is being analysed and where they may fall short, and we consider whether they can be made usable for developing innovative research in the other age phases. Overall, we try to show that a Linking Ages approach opens up new perspectives, not only for age research but also for age-relevant public policy.
