Science, Technology and the Ageing Society

Tiago Moreira picks apart the notion of `ageing society' from the inside. Science, Technology and the Ageing Society explores the role of science and technology in making the institutions and knowledge that have turned ageing into a social issue and endowed `society' with the capacity to age. Ranging from questions of population to care, economy to medicine, Moreira's analysis not only remakes ageing studies but also shows how science and technology pose problems for a society obsessed with finding `solutions' to ageing. Brett Neilson-Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University Science, Technology and the `Ageing Society' is an exceptionally readable and timely compendium of explorations into the technoscientific making of ageing populations. Drawing upon science and technology studies, actor-network theory and a 'history of the present' perspective, Tiago Moreira carefully analyzes the controversies, multiplicities and uncertainties by which the `bio' and the `techno' converged to produce modern gerontological research, experimentation, advocacy, and care. The book will leave readers with many critical questions about what it means to grow older today in a society of risk and hope. Stephen Katz, Trent University. In this impressive book Tiago Moreira convincingly demonstrates that calling upon science and technology to solve `the problems of aging' overlooks the many ways in which sciences and technologies, in the plural, are involved in these problems: they partly caused them, help to define them, disagree about them, and get reshaped by them. Complex intertwinements indeed! Annemarie Mol, Professor of Anthropology of the Body in the University of Amsterdam