CSDE Winter 2025 Lecture

Sasha Johfre (UW)

This talk will discuss emerging perspectives on the social construction of age, with a focus on implications for demography and inequality research. I will draw on several of my ongoing projects about conceptualizing, theorizing, and measuring age as a social construct. “Aging” is often considered an individual and societal problem; but there is much more we can learn by going beyond this perspective and studying “age” as a multilevel and multidimensional system of inequality. Age is an under-theorized yet central piece of social structure, interactions, and individual experience. Being more precise in our theory and measurement of age opens the door for more expansive and impactful empirical and theoretical research on individuals and society.