Public Policy and Professional Practice

I am a ‘Keelite’ through and through having first arrived here as an undergraduate student in the 1970s. I took a Combined Honours degree in English Literature and Geography (with Psychology and Geology subsidiary subjects) and, after a year away, returned to undertake my PhD (in Social/Human Geography). I have lived and worked in the Potteries ever since.

I ended up in ‘ageing’ completely by accident having been appointed on a temporary nine-month contract to manage a small research team at the Beth Johnson Foundation (a voluntary organisation known for its innovative work with older people). I then stayed for six years as the Foundation’s Research Officer where I undertook a variety of projects before returning to Keele in 1988 to help set up the first programmes in Gerontology (Certificate, Diploma and Masters) outside London. I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in October 1995, Reader in September 1997 and, in May 1999, was awarded a personal Chair. At Keele, I have done a variety of jobs including Head of the Department of Applied Social Studies, Head of the School of Social Relations and Founder Director of the Research Institute for Life Course Studies. I am President-Elect (2008-10) and President (2010-12) of the British Society of Gerontology.

Building on a background of innovative participatory action-research with older people in the voluntary sector, my research career has been distinguished by a commitment to inter and multi-disciplinary perspectives. I have long-standing research interests in women’s lives as they age and 25 years’ experience of policy and practice-relevant research. This has included studies of the family life of older people conducted under the ESRC’s ‘Population and Household Change’ programme in the 1990s; of informal care for older adults under the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s ‘Work and Family Life’ programme; and, for the past decade, studies of the development of new retirement villages and the extent to which they facilitate or impede family and intergenerational relations.

I am currently Project Leader for a major interdisciplinary study being conducted with colleagues in the Humanities and partners in the New Vic Theatre Education Department. Entitled ‘Ages and Stages: The Place of Theatre in Representations and Recollections of Ageing’, the project is one of only 12 to secure funding under the final phase of the national cross-council ‘New Dynamics of Ageing’ Programme (www.newdynamics.group.shef.ac.uk).

I am the author/editor of 18 books and monographs, over 70 book chapters and journal articles, and many research reports. I am currently on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Intergenerational Relationships: programs, policy and research and Policy Press’s Ageing and the Lifecourse series.

I am an experienced and successful supervisor of PhD students and am a member of the Centre for Social Gerontology  and of the Research Institute for Social Sciences .

For the 2009/10 academic year, I am on (part-time) research leave and doing some teaching on the MA in Gerontology/MSc Geriatric Medicine/European Masters in Gerontology (EuMaG) programmes.