Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics: Aging and Long-Term Care
The deadline for submission for this issue is September 15, 2012.
Guest Editors: Lisa A. Eckenwiler and Carol Levine
The past several decades have seen significant improvement in the health of older adults. In the United States and many other parts of the world, people are living longer and with less chronic disability than ever before. The aging population is burgeoning. While currently the proportion of older persons is 17 percent, by 2050 it is expected to be 26 percent. The oldest old, or those eighty and above, will increase from being just 1.4 percent of the population to 4.3 percent. The elderly, and especially the oldest old, are disproportionately women. Their caregivers are also disproportionately women, as family care is the predominant mode of care. Projections further suggest that elderly populations in many developing countries are growing more rapidly than those in affluent ones. Nearly 250 million of the approximately 420 million people over sixty-five live in developing countries, and expectations are that the majority will live there in coming decades. Compared to wealthier countries, these mostly low and middle-income countries will undergo this demographic shift quite quickly, even as they continue to contend with the burden of diseases like HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, and with considerably less in the way of resources, including human resources.
These changing demographics generate a greater need for long-term care, whether that is provided in the home, in community settings, or in institutions. While there has been considerable debate concerning the nature and extent of future long-term care needs, especially given declining rates of disability in recent decades, the consensus is that they will grow. While governments, global health organizations like the WHO and PAHO, and other agents have acknowledged the importance of addressing current and coming demands related to aging and long-term care, the current state of the dependent elderly and of long-term care systems around the world are, on the whole, fragile and in urgent need of attention. Moreover, analyses and recommendations that are informed by feminist approaches are largely lacking.
This special issue of IJFAB aims to contribute to the ongoing conversations around ethics and policy in aging and long-term care. We invite essays written from a feminist perspective on any topic related to aging and long-term care. Possible topics include:
What characterizes a feminist approach to aging and/or long-term care and what contributions can it make to theory and policy?
How do feminist views about "family" affect long-term care approaches?
What is the structure of income provision for the aged in a particular country or region and what are its ethical implications?
What are the ethical implications of different kinds of support systems for the dependent elderly?
How is long-term care labor gendered and what ethical concerns does this raise?
How can a feminist vision of long-term care accommodate cultural and religious traditions that place special responsibilities for long-term care on women and girls?
What are the implications of the feminization of labor migration on the provision of long-term care needs around the world?
What is the structure of labor and or economic policy in a given country or region and what are its ethical implications for family caregivers?
How are representations of old age gendered and "performed" in the media and in the arts, and what are the ethical and health implications?
Submission instructions for authors are available at http://www.ijfab.org/style_guidelines.html
Papers should be submitted in Microsoft Word format as email attachments to IJFAB@sunysb.edu.
The submission deadline for this issue is September 15, 2012.
