This book is a timely collection that explores the materialities and embodiments of growing older today, opening onto a richly interdisciplinary field of imaginative research about subjective lives and social worlds. We use ‘materialities’ as a term to identify the various places, technologies, things, rhythms, designs, mobilities and environments in which our experience of ageing is grounded and observable. ‘Embodiments’ is a complementary term we use to highlight the ways in which the cultural processes of ageing are physically mediated and experienced. For example, menopause or longevity may be obvious corporeal events, but they are embodied as subjectively meaningful through cultural and symbolic practices. By focusing on materialities and embodiments, this book's premise is that understanding ageing invites a commitment to witnessing, interpreting, documenting and caring about our intimate and daily worlds of meaning. The contributors to this volume, all experts in ageing and critical gerontological scholarship, make original forays into these everyday worlds. They select often taken-for-granted moments, spaces, things and experiences that evoke what it means to grow older, creating guidelines to thinking further about the consequences of new political, economic and global changes for older generations and ageing populations. While this book is about Western societies, its theoretical and methodological contributions to ageing studies are envisioned as relevant to other parts of the world, especially those experiencing the prospects and challenges of expanding ageing populations.

I was inspired to create this volume by my years of presenting, teaching and publishing research on ageing. I have been fortunate to be part of a community of critical gerontologists who have introduced to ageing studies influential concepts and resourceful methods from traditions outside of gerontology, in particular Marxist political economy, phenomenology, feminism, LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) and disability studies, the health humanities, media and performance studies, post-structuralism, and social studies of science and technology. I am also grateful that my work and collaborations have been included in leading texts on critical gerontology (Katz, 2003, 2010), cultural gerontology (Katz, 2015), feminist age studies (Katz, 1999; Marshall and Katz, 2006), the gerontological humanities (Katz, 2000; Katz and McHugh, 2010) and ageing futures (Katz and Whitehouse, 2017)