Disability and Ageing: Towards a Critical Perspective

Establishing a critical and interdisciplinary dialogue, this text engages with the typically disparate fields of social gerontology and disability studies. It investigates the subjective experiences of two groups rarely considered together in research - people ageing with long-standing disability and people first experiencing disability with ageing. This book challenges assumptions about impairment in later life and the residual nature of the ’fourth age’. It proposes that the experience of ’disability’ in older age reaches beyond the bodily context and can involve not only a challenge to a sense of value and meaning in life, but also ongoing efforts in response.

Ann Leahy is a postdoctoral researcher at the ERC-funded DANCING Project at Maynooth University’s Department of Law and the ALL Institute. She was previously Assistant CEO of Age & Opportunity, a non-governmental organisation in Ireland.