|
 |
CURRENT ISSUE | BACK ISSUES | SUBSCRIBE | ABOUT |
 |
|
Fall 2005 Our Guest Editor
It has been thirty years since the term ageism was coined, yet bigotry and prejudice directed at people simply because of age persist, permeating society at all levels. For a twenty-first-century look at ageism, the Generations editorial board called on Jon Hendricks, a social gerontologist known for his broad view of human aging and his keen insight into the effects on the individual of larger social forces, which he has demonstrated over the course of a distinguished career in research and teaching. Jon Hendricks is currently dean of the Honors College at Oregon State University and is a longtime faculty member and former chair of the Department of Sociology there. He was drawn to sociology as a way to examine the complexity of people’s lives and to gerontology because, he says, “it’s not in many scholarly pursuits that we find ourselves becoming the subject, as we do in aging. One of the rewards is that we come across glimmers of ourselves. And whether we integrate that into our own lives and self-concepts says a lot about how we approach our subject.” Fifteen years ago, Hendricks told an interviewer of his hopes that the next generation of gerontologists could truly build on the work of their predecessors to further research and its application to improve elders’ lives. His contributions to that end have been highly influential, particularly through the strength of his many publications, editorial work on books and journals, and professional affliations. For example, he is the series editor of Society and Aging for Baywood and of Foundations of Gerontology (with Robert Kastenbaum) for Little, Brown. His books range from the popular introductory text, Aging in Mass Society (with C. D. Hendricks), which has become a standard and is now in its third edition, to the forthcoming Enduring Questions (with D. Sheets and D. Bradley). He is the recent winner of the prestigious Clark Tibbets Award for Outstanding Contributions to Gerontology, among many other honors. These days, Hendricks says, his most immediate intellectual challenge is to examine how issues of temporality are affected by our own aging. “Can we become more generative? Do we realize that our own success is not as important as the success of our discipline? I have a much more visceral, palpable feeling of time on a personal level, and that has influenced my professional perspective. Our own footsteps may not reach the destination, but they can help others travel along the road.” And what about fifteen years from now? “If we are not careful,” Hendricks says, “we will have a society in which competition for scarce resources will be more fierce. Age groups are being set against each other, and many do not seem to realize that the older people they see tomorrow will be themselves. The fate of our elders is our own fate -- and that of our children. We address problems like ageism so we can protect the elders of today, which means protecting our own children when they are old and we are not around. Why does ageism persist? What are the effects? Have we made any progress? What can be done? That is what this issue of Generations is about.” - Mary Johnson From Generations Fall 2005 issue, 29(3): 4. © 2005 American Society on Aging
|
