Aging and its Tropes

Columbia University

The Columbia University project on aging “Aging and its Tropes” focuses on the study of “aging” as a concern brought together at the interface of elderly experience, care, and questions of social justice, as it brings together the medical and the carceral. Our research and discursive sites comprise both “complete and total institutions” and non-institutional settings: the hospital, the prison, the arts, the street.


Health as a Human Right

Panayotis Yatagantzidis presents some tentative definitions of the concept of human rights as delineated in different schools of thought, and moves towards a constitutional cartography of the right to health in nations-members of the European Union. From within that perspective he examines the international protection provided by the Treaty of the EU and the European Declaration of Human Rights and analyzes the existing international legal discourse. He locates the limits of protection provided by the existing legal framework in the EU, and with a commitment to the social welfare state and the principles of Democracy, arrives at a number of conclusions that envelope within them the protection of health.


Project Overview

An overview of the Aging and Its Tropes project, including details on workshops held in 2015 and 2016 and bios of the project participants.


Project Summary: Aging and its Tropes

The team at Columbia University working on the Mellon-funded project on aging, focuses on the study of “aging” as a concern brought together at the interface of elderly experience, care, and questions of social justice, as it brings together the medical and the carceral. Our research and discursive sites, under the title “Aging and its Tropes,” comprise both “complete and total institutions” and non-institutional settings: the arts (narrative, representational, plastic arts, street art, ...


Link added by SOF-Heyman Center to Aging and its Tropes | 5 Apr 2016

Panourgiá, N, Gourgouris, S, and Gillooly, E. 2015 (May 15). Aging in Medicine / Aging in the Street

First encounter in the Aging Workshop Series(Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, Inst. of Comparative Literature and Society, and Heyman Center for the Humanities).


Link added by SOF-Heyman Center to Aging and its Tropes | 5 Apr 2016

Panourgiá, Neni. 2015. Medical humanities and its disciplinary challenges.

Work in progress for submission for publication. [Please do not quote without the expressed permission by the author. Citations permitted.]




Document (Word) uploaded by Neni Panourgiá to Aging and its Tropes | 14 Jan 2016

Open Questions: Aging and its Tropes

How is it possible for MedHum to produce a knowledge that is useful and useable, unless it engenders an epistemic dialogue between medicine, the humanities, and the social sciences? Does “aging” have any meaning beyond analytical? Are there other frameworks besides the medical to understand and explain the experiences of older people who visit the emergency room?     Is aging an ontology, is it a circumstance, or is it an epistemology? Can we speak of “aging” as a process or as a state...