Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard
Date and Time
Location
"Healthy Forever? Aging, Mobility, and the Transformation of Later Life"
Speaker:
Cara Kiernan Fallon, PhD Candidate, History of Science, Harvard University.
Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday of the week before the event.
Contact:
Shana Rabinowich
shana_rabinowich@hks.harvard.edu
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Abstract:
Between 1900 and 2000, life expectancy increased by three decades—from 47 to 77—a greater increase in one century than during the entire previous history of humankind. With dramatic changes in life expectancy came new expectations for individual control of health and function in later life. This talk traces changing ideas about aging by examining transformations in a particular material object—the cane. First, I explore how canes transformed from desirable objects signaling wealth and power into medical instruments used primarily by the disabled elderly in the mid-twentieth century, while the aging process itself came under scientific scrutiny and medical management. Second, I consider how canes emerged as a contradictory technology of healthy aging: while enabling greater mobility, they also marked users as disabled, or as failing to achieve independent, functional, and “healthy” aging. By closely examining changes to the cane, this talk provides historical context for an important contemporary problem—the growing support for “healthy” aging that nonetheless relied on extensive medical management.
Bio:
Cara Kiernan Fallon is a fifth-year graduate student in Harvard’s History of Science department. Her dissertation focuses on the history of aging, particularly the emerging concepts of healthy aging and the medical and public health responses to age-related conditions. Prior to graduate school, she earned a master’s degree in public health at the Yale School of Public Health.