Остаряване и грижа (предварително очертаване на едно възможно изследователско поле)
Aging and Care (Preliminary Outlines of a Possible Research Field)

Summary/Abstract: Questions about the specific nature of the lifeworld – or rather the lifeworlds – of „older“ people—about how loneliness affects aging and vice versa, and about who cares for them—would outline the contours of a possible research field as part of a larger project on social inequalities. This project would thematize losses as a significant social phenomenon through the perspective of declassed social actors in various spheres of practice, who have lost material and/or symbolic resources, as well as prospects for the future, meaning, and hope. My inspiration for studying this issue came from the interview “Loneliness” in the corpus of texts The Weight of the World by Pierre Bourdieu and his team of researchers, where the central problem is the withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities under conditions of the unlimited dominance of neoliberalism (“neoliberal governability”) in the last decade of the past century and the first decades of the new one. Considering retirement and aging, in most cases, as a specific form of declassing (falling out, exclusion from society) leads to Simmel’s definition of declassing, linked to the consumption of support mechanisms, social assistance, and services. Social services, however, are themselves tied to an assessment of the needs of candidate-users according to criteria that select cases, creating preconditions for inequalities and another type of exclusion—remaining below the threshold, ending up on waiting lists. My hypothesis is that this is a case of a particular declassing within declassing, based on the relative (relational) possession of different forms of capital (health status, financial and material security, close social environment, etc.) compared to other cases.

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