Contesting Boomageddon? Identity, politics and economy in the global milieu

This issue presents contributions of members of The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) Ageing and Sociology thematic group, formed in 2015 to provide a supportive network for sociologists working in, or researching, the field of ageing. A key aim of the Ageing and Sociology thematic group is to foster collaborative endeavours and disseminate sociological theory and knowledge, which – particularly in Australian contexts – tends to become subsumed into gerontological research. Aberdeen and Bye (2013) stress the historical biomedical and economic focus of ageing research and research funding in Australia, and argue that this hampers sociologists’ capacity to critically engage with ageing issues on a global level. It also drives the relative neglect of sociological theoretical perspectives within ageing research (Marshall and Bengston, 2011) including within the field of social gerontology. In turn, as Asquith (2009: 266) laments: ‘the field [of ageing] has been largely vacated by sociologists’. Not only has research on ageing been commonly treated as of marginal interest to sociology, the discipline has also made few attempts to understand the central importance of age for social structure or personal agency.