Growing Old in Europe: Moral Economy of Sustainable Care for Older Adults

To a varying degree, almost all the EU states are faced with accelerating demographic ageing and the challenge of developing sustainable long-term care (LTC) frameworks for older adults amidst equally increasing labour pressures placed on families as the primary bearers of care. The process is further complicated by the fact that almost 20% of those aged 65 and more are at risk of social exclusion (Eurostat, 2024). EU policy agendas are progressively shifting towards relieving family burdens and incentivising various policy solutions to aid the elderly population at risk of social exclusion. However, reports from governmental bodies, civil society organisations, and academic research acknowledge that while many paths towards satisfactory and possibly sustainable LTC models have been initiated, the needs of older adults for care are insufficiently met with caring responsibilities being unevenly distributed.

This course invites students to look beyond the dominant approaches to care for older adults that focus on technical, administrative, and fiscal sustainability. The course challenges this perspective of sustainable care and moves towards an examination of sustainable care as revolving around both economic and moral issues. In the course, students will learn how to approach sustainable elderly care by focusing on social constructions of vulnerability, dependency, deservingness and the fairness of distribution of caring responsibilities among individuals and institutions. We start and end the course with the critical problem-solving question: how can current paths to sustainable elderly care in Europe be improved in addressing inequalities among older adults and those caring for them?

Grounded in the sociology of ageing and later life, students will learn to shift from biological understandings of ageing and care towards an understanding of care as a complex interplay between individual needs and structural conditions shaping responses to those needs. Extending into the interdisciplinary field of ethics of care, students will distinguish between different normative perspectives on how ideal care arrangements should be organised. By doing so, they will examine elderly care policy as a constantly evolving social, cultural and political puzzle of responding to inequalities that persist in later life of older adults.

Building on this grounding, each student will conduct a supervised, state-focused empirical analysis of care for older adults in their respective national context. Students will use qualitative content analysis to analyse and interpret policy frameworks triangulating their findings with previously prepared existing research, statistical and administrative data to assess how sustainability of care is defined and how principles of ethical care are being implemented in their respective countries. The course ends in a team effort of writing up a comparative research report and preparing an oral presentation.

General learning outcomes

• Understanding the foundational concepts of social and sustainable ageing.
• Understanding the foundational concepts in ethics of care.
• Critical thinking and problem-solving skills through conceptual discussions of ageing and care.
• Building a social science research design based in qualitative methodology.
• Qualitative content analysis design and implementation in policy analysis.
• Comparative social science research reasoning.
• Policy and secondary data collection at national and EU levels of governing.
• Interpreting qualitative findings and triangulation with secondary data.
• Research reflexivity and solving issues in the research process.
• Team collaboration in research environment.
• Writing a structured theory informed and interpretative research report.
• Oral presentation skills utilising conceptual and methodological terminology in ageing and care.