Advance access: click here to go the journal's page
Out now in open advance access (ahead of print): Issue 2/2026 of the International Journal of Ageing and Later Life (IJAL) — a Special Issue titled "Intersectionality Matters: Age, Care, Power Relations," edited by Stefan Schweigler, Anna-Christina Kainradl, Helen Kohlen, Ulla Kriebernegg, and Eva-Maria Trinkaus.
Featuring contributions by: Albert Banerjee; Anna-Christina Kainradl, Brigitte Kukovetz, and Annette Sprung; Justine McGovern, Ingrid Hellström, and Jan Oyebode; June Oh; Eva-Maria Trinkaus; Katja A. Rießenberger, Tobias Wörle, Barbara Barbosa Neves, and Florian Fischer; Ulrika Lagerlöf Nilsson and Helene Castenbrandt; Amanda C. Bull and Nicole K. Dalmer; Karin Schönpflug; and Saloua Berdai Chaouni.
This issue’s contributions aspire to enhance our understanding of the complexities surrounding aging in the context of a caring society.
Age(ing) and care(ing) are constantly materialized, culturally shaped and reshaped, unequally distributed, and generally invisible. Offering diverse approaches to how social and political identity categories intersect, these contributions aim to unravel the dynamics of power relations embedded in the aging process within a caring society. The increasing interest in intersectional research has not yet reached the point of fundamentally affecting how societies think of age(ing) and care(ing). Therefore, this special issue’s activist agenda is intentional. It has the potential of affecting social and governmental structures by suggesting alternate perspectives on age(ing) and care(ing) by fostering minoritarian theories that transcend disciplinary boundaries. The aim of this issue is to create a space where theories, ideas, and perspectives related to aging and care are brought into conversation by incorporating intersectional and interdisciplinary points of view.
The contributions to this special issue belong to various academic disciplines and enter into a productive relationship through their heterogeneity. This collection, drawing from the fields of history, philosophy, media analysis, and social science empiricism, aims to mutually highlight questions of age, care, and power relations and to conceive of them as a necessarily transdisciplinary theoretical formation. To this end, they approach the critique of power by intertwining different theoretical traditions, including, among others, critical gerontological, decolonial, and queer/crip/feminist strands.
These are brought into dialogue with concepts of power, including those by Foucault, Crenshaw, and Hay. Thus, the contributions also demonstrate that an interdisciplinary claim is often inherent in the intersectional claim, which consists precisely in bringing together minoritized and heterodox perspectives. This results in rich, pliable, and convincing analyses that repeatedly highlight the political prerequisites, limitations, or futurities of aging and care. Discourses, ideas, spaces, infrastructures, technologies, narratives, aesthetics, and academic scholarship itself are thus questioned as to what forms of (collective) action and feeling they enable or prevent for, with, against, or through older people. In each case, it is of interest what type of practice is thereby realized or realizable in a (counter-)hegemonic, experimental, tactical, strategic, or structural manner.
