Search

While the determinants of successful aging receive much attention from researchers, few studies in Canada and elsewhere have considered the newspaper portrayals of seniors who do or not age well. Yet the mass media constitute a significant component of the social context in which aging is experienced and understood. To make meaning of aging and its various experiences, and to transmit them from one generation to the next, the society draws on various cultural and media products such as novels, films, paintings, and media texts and images. Through thematic analysis of 146 articles featuring older adults in various contexts including family, work, civic engagement, social policy, health care, consumer market, and leisure published in The Globe and Mail in 2004-2006, this paper deconstructs stereotypes of successful aging. Findings from this study suggest that media discourses of successful aging perpetuate exclusion of marginalized adults and provide the cultural legitimization for persistent social inequalities in terms of gender, class, age, and health status. This paper sheds light on intra-generational media ageism whereby some older adults, particularly older women, are blamed for failing to age well, while the structural determinants of late-life disadvantage are made invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how seniors are portrayed in the "Globe and Mail". Thirty articles published in 2004 were selected and thematically analyzed. Seniors were portrayed in six different contexts, including family, work/retirement, community networks, scientific studies of the population, social and health care policy, and social attitudes to aging. Issues pertaining to seniors reflected three themes. The diversity of seniors theme made visible seniors of different genders, ages, health statuses, abilities and needs. The successful aging theme provided positive examples of aging well, but marginalized seniors who did not match these expectations thereby fostering intra-generational ageism. The apocalyptic demography/inter-generational conflict theme underscored the importance of society's support system for the elderly, but raised the issue of inter-generational inequality, presenting the elderly as a burden on younger persons in families and society at large. Critical analyses suggested that both negative and positive newspaper portrayals of seniors may be ageist. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the link between public service broadcasting (PSB) and democracy in the West and in Russia. It discusses the role of PSB in sustaining the public sphere and the state's role in regulating PSB. It explains why some Russian scholars regarded corporatization of the media as a proxy to broadcasting that serves public interests. It also discusses the significance of PSB as one of the key foundations of democracy.

The name of the 45th Annual ISA Convention reminds of Joseph Stiglitz’s well-known book Globalization and its Discontents and makes one wonder whether globalization is synonymous, or is leading to, hegemony - of who, over whom, of what kind? The ongoing debates in the Russian social sciences are focusing on these issues, but the discourses they produce remain cloaked largely in mystery for much of the scientific maintream. This paper, based on the results of several large-scale research projects conducted at the initiative of Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his Foundation for Socio-Economic, International and Political Studies and carried out by a prominent group of Russian scholars, analyses the responses Russian political sociology and sociology of international relations provide to the challenges of globalization considered in the context of the New World Order, the transformation of power relations in world politics, and the emergence of new centers of hegemony in global governance. The paper demonstrates that the main thematic lines of analysis of the complexities of globalization in Russia are influenced by the need for the country which used to be a former world superpower to reassess its current position and role and to adjust to the drastic global transformations of which it has been one of the major causes. It provides evidence in support of the claim that the concepts of national sovereignty, self-determination, and political self-determination in particular, are the key instruments in the analysis of Russia’s role and place in the globalizing world. Drawing parallels between the Russian globalization studies and the seminal writings produced by Western authors, it addresses the issues of academic preponderance and diversity, domination and exclusion in the currents of international political sociology, considering the ways in which relations of ruling shape scholarly discourses. The three parts of the paper outline the major questions, or thematic blocks, connected to the study of globalization in Russia. The first part presents how globalization is defined, how it is linked to the issues of power and hegemony in global governance, and what are its main characteristics and contradictions as perceived in Russian contemporary social thought. The second part reveals the theoretical reaction to the globalization challenges resulting in the development of the concept of Russia’s political and economic self-determination, which is applied to the analysis of the country’s behavior in the globalizing world. The third part presents the critical analysis of Russia’s role and place in globalization. It elaborates on the theoretical debates about the forced integration into the international economic, political and informational structures, making an enormous effort and jumping into the wagon of the current winners, versus a messianic attitude declaring Russia’s necessity to take the lead of the losers of globalization, the discontents opposing the trends of global hegemony. Stressing the increasingly significant role of corporations and corporatism, which in Russia takes the form of oligarchic rule, it considers the impacts of Russia’s choice of authoritarianism or democracy on the future world order according to various scenarios developed by the Russian scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The media are one vehicle for shaping attitudes about age and ageing, and have been often blamed for perpetuating ageism and cultural stereotypes about seniors, particularly older women (Cohen, 2002). Yet, while a few studies have been concerned with how gender inequalities are portrayed by the North American media, little is known about the media portrayals of older men and older women in the post-soviet world, where both the cultural norms concerning the elders, and the traditional roles of elderly men and women in families, organizations, and societies may be different from the North. Very few cross-cultural comparisons of the media portrayals of seniors have been conducted so far (Harwood and Roy, 1999), and none of them has considered the portrayals of intra- and intergenerational gender inequalities in the news media. The purpose of my paper will be to compare the contemporary portrayals of older men and older women in the Toronto Globe and Mail and of the Moscow Nezavisimaya Gazeta, and to discuss whether the cultural attitudes towards male and female seniors that these portrayals reinforce (or resist) are the same or different in the two countries. Are older men and older women in Canada and in Russia portrayed similarly, or are some older adults portrayed differently from others, and in what terms? When a story involves both seniors and non-seniors, how are older men and older women portrayed in comparison to younger people? The analyses of whether in different cultures male and female seniors are portrayed in similar or different roles, and whether the news media in different societies may depict intra- and inter-generational gender inequalities in different terms, will be very insightful for scholars concerned with the cultural aspects of globalization. Canada and Russia are chosen to reflect the diversity and similarity of the West and of the post-communist space: these two largest countries of the North American and Eurasian continents have obvious political, economic, institutional and cultural differences, and yet share important similarities regarding the heterogeneity of their populations, and the northern dimension of their geography. The Globe and Mail and Nezavisimaya Gazeta are selected for analysis because they are referred to (and portray themselves) as national newspapers respectively in Canada and in Russia. Thus this study may provide some general insights into the portrayals of seniors and inequality in Canadian and Russian media, to serve as benchmarks for further investigation. The method used will be thematic analysis of all articles focusing on seniors and their issues published in The Globe and Mail in 2004 and in Nezavisimaya Gazeta in 2005. Findings will compare how various characteristics (such as economic, social, health, and political status) differentiate among the portrayals of older men and older women and the roles in which they are presented in the two newspapers. Certain groups of seniors may experience feelings of disempowerment, exclusion, and segregation which may be largely ignored by the media, and therefore rendering them invisible to the public. I will situate the results of my analyses within the context of research literature on ageing, gender, inequality, and globalization. Implications for addressing ageism through social and media policies in Canada, in Russia and elsewhere will be discussed. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]