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Dancing for Their Lives explores the vibrant world of retired Chinese women known as "dancing grannies” who seek fulfillment and companionship amidst societal upheaval. These women, part of China’s “lost generation,” gather in parks and public squares to reclaim their lives through dance in the wake of Chinese economic and cultural transformations. The book challenges prevailing narratives of aging societies, portraying old age as a site of social innovation rather than decline. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Chengdu, China, Dancing for Their Lives reveals how retirees learn to navigate shifting social norms and values while actively creating new models for growing older. The book’s insights resonate beyond Chinese society, offering lessons on resilience and the pursuit of meaning in any aging population. Dancing for Their Lives underscores the human capacity to craft purposeful lives amid uncertainty, transcending geographical boundaries to illuminate the universal quest for fulfillment in later years.

Uncovers the diverse and unexpected ways aging populations engage with technology.

As digital technologies further embed themselves in everyday life, how do older adults navigate and adapt to these tools? Digital Repertoires introduces the concept of the “digital repertoire” to investigate the evolving ways older people engage with technology across cultural and social contexts. Based on global research, this work confronts typical stereotypes of aging and digital exclusion and emphasizes the agency, creativity, and new challenges older adults experience in their digital interactions.

Including voices of scholars from anthropology, sociology, gerontology, communication studies, and design, this book offers theoretical depth as well as empirical breadth, making it essential reading for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working at the intersection of aging and technology.
 

"This extraordinary book is yet another example of a growing tradition—a literature of compelling and edifying oral history. Dr. Salber has worked for years in one of North Carolina's rural areas, and doing so, has come to know certain elderly people rather well. She has attended their physical complaints, but she has also wanted to know how they live, what they hope for, and what they worry about. She has asked them to speak on the record, to declare to others what occurs to them in the waning hours of their particular lives. The result is a series of American voices reminding us what it has been like for relatively vulnerable, if not defenseless, southern country folk in this rapidly disappearing 20th century.
"They are men and women, blacks and whites, Dr. Salber's teachers. The North Carolinians in this book have no trouble giving us a good measure of open-eyed social comment, not to mention intelligent self-scrutiny and astute moral reflection. These pages glow with all that. . . . This book represents an intense and unyielding ethical as well as medical and literary commitment by a most impressive physician."—Robert Coles