JRAI Special Issue Launch: Aging Time Beings

Friday 19 September 2025   12.00-2.00 pm BST

This is an online event. Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RmUk2ictTeqIZorofXTy-A#/registration

JRAI Special Issue: Aging Time Beings

with editors:
Lone Grøn (Professor, VIVE, Danish Center for Social Science Research)
Lotte Meinert (Professor, Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University)

special issue contributors:
Cheryl Mattingly (Professor, Departments of Anthropology and Philosophy, Aarhus University)
Susan Reynolds Whyte (Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen)
Maria Louw (Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University)
Lawrence Cohen (Professor, Anthropology and South and Southeast Asian Studies; co-director of the Medical Anthropology Program, University of California, Berkeley)
Jason Danely (Reader in Anthropology, Oxford Brookes University)
Janelle Taylor (Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto)

and JRAI associate editor:
Cathrine Degnen (Professor of Anthropology, Newcastle University)

Proposing to understand humans as time beings, this special issue of the JRAI invites readers to explore the intricate relationship between ageing and time through particular experiences of ageing time beings. What can we learn about time and general anthropological theory by taking seriously experiences of ageing time beings from different places in the world? Drawing on ethnographic insights from Canada, Denmark, India, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Uganda, and the USA, the collection challenges conventional representations of ageing by examining diverse modes of experiencing and measuring time. It probes how large-scale historical changes, institutional time regimes, intimate rhythms, and singular moments of lived experience intertwine to reveal the multiplicity – and inherent groundlessness – of temporal realities. By engaging with dominant narratives such as ‘active ageing’ and ‘filial piety’, as well as less conventional values and poetics of ageing and time, the issue foregrounds both the uncertainties and the possibilities of ‘the good’ that may emerge in later life.