Aging Our Way Discussed at Bookstore

RFH 2010, Cover Stories, Colgate News

Mon, Sep 26, 2011

The Colgate Bookstore will host a presentation by Colgate Professor Meika Loe about her research and new book Aging Our Way: Lessons for Living from 85 and Beyond on Tuesday, Oct. 4 at 4:30 p.m. The event is free and open to all.

Aging Our Way follows the everyday lives of 30 elders (ages 85-102) living at home and mostly alone to understand how they create and maintain meaningful lives for themselves. Drawing on the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on aging and three years of interviews with the elders, the book explores how elders navigate the practical challenges of living as independently as possible while staying healthy, connected, and comfortable. While most books on the subject treat old age as a social problem and elders as simply diminished versions of their former selves, Way Aging Our views them as they really are: lively, complicated, engaging people finding creative ways to make their aging as meaningful and manageable as possible.

Meika Loe is Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies, Director of the Women’s Studies Program, and Interim Director of the Upstate Institute at Colgate University, where she teaches courses on aging, gender, culture and medicine. She is the author of The Rise of Viagra: How the Little Blue Pill Changed Sex in Americaand co-editor (with Kelly Joyce) of Technogenarians: Studying Health and Illness Through an Aging, Science, and Technology Lens.

Her critical scholarship on culture, age, medicine, sexuality, and gender has appeared in a range of academic journals and her research has been featured on National Public Radio (NPR), BBC, Kobra (in Sweden), as well as in The Washington Post, London Sunday Times, Psychology Today, Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA), The New England Journal of Medicine, Mother Jones, and O Magazine. Her research on aging in place was supported in part by the Upstate Institute of Colgate University and the Center for Research on Women at SUNY Albany.