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“My Story” is based on a life story approach. This study aims to facilitate therapeutic alliances by providing a format for older and younger people to interact.

Three pairings were studied to explore the experiences of the older and younger person using “My Story”. The focus of the case studies was on how and if any therapeutic alliance emerged.

This study found that in the two of the pairings, “My Story” helped to create a bond and mutual benefit for the participants’ central to a therapeutic alliance. This led one of the pairings to develop into an intergenerational friendship and potentially help with loneliness.

As this was an exploratory and small pilot, more cases and research are required to fully assess if “My Story” is a useful approach to develop intergenerational befriending.

Intergenerational befriending may be one solution that could help with loneliness and social isolation through forming a therapeutic alliance to make the befriending successful.

Loneliness and social isolation for older people remain a problem.

An original pilot was undertaken to test the approach by bringing together older people identified as lonely by a voluntary sector provider and pairing these with a student volunteer. The students visited the older person over six weeks to discuss their life story and create an artefact based on the story for the older person.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of integration in tackling isolation in later life, propose institutions as a key factor in forming intergenerational friendships, and assess the key conditions which need to be established.

Assessment based on work on social contact theory by Professor Miles Hewstone, amongst others, as well as case studies, research from Age UK and the Social Integration Commission.

Isolation can be seen as part of the broader issue of a failure of social integration. A lack of integration in earlier life results in networks which are not age-diverse. This results in isolation in later life. Institutions are key in preventing this, as they allow for the formation of intergenerational friendships and trust.

Based on an article by the author (www.demos.co.uk/publications/mapping integration), age-specific integration is reviewed, and supplementary research considered.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine everyday multilingual peer play interactions through their implications for the development of friendships among immigrant children.

Bringing together linguistic anthropology and conversation analysis as methodological approaches, this chapter explores friendship processes among Moroccan immigrant girls in Spain, specifically by analyzing the structure and composition of one such peer group, as well as their multilingual and multimodal interactions.

The main findings are that the multi-age, mixed-expertise composition of this peer group, as well as the semiotically flexible forms of participation and interaction that it encourages, are conducive to remarkably inclusive groups and strong friendships among a diverse group of Moroccan immigrant girls (including, younger and older girls, girls with disabilities and girls with very different immigration histories). Solid inclusive friendships are cemented in this peer interactional environment first because being able to interchangeably negotiate expert/novice participation roles in game interactions affirms feelings of social competence among all the girls, and second because achieving shared understandings in play entails successfully negotiating rules and expectations, which promotes trust and collaboration, while minimizing conflict. The inclusive nature of these girls’ peer-groups contrasts with the exclusion they encounter in other social settings and relationships.

In this sense, this chapter has important implications for understanding immigrant children’s abilities to respond to forms of social exclusion by forming diverse peer groups and strong friendships of their own. These friendships offer them a path to combat the marginalization they experience in other domains of social life.

This chapter reviews the conceptual developments in neighbour studies, charting the shift and bringing together older work on the ‘distance-closeness’ dynamic of neighbour relations with newer ‘equality of neighbours’ approaches. It seeks to empirically extend the sociology of neighbours through an analysis of the experiential narratives of neighbours living in contexts of urban multiculture in the United Kingdom. Drawing on two previous studies of urban multicultural social life and a small street study of neighbours in London, this chapter explores the everyday ‘publicness’ of the neighbour and examines the ways in which recent work on social infrastructure can be productively applied to neighbour relations. This chapter concludes that where cultural and social difference is a very ordinary – although not necessarily easy – experience, neighbour relations offer the potential to work as radical sites of pragmatic multiculturalism.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for a transformative education that acknowledges and values the capacities of mature students, where higher education institutions reflect on their own assumptions and practices in order to become more inclusive and open to difference.

The stories told by Eliza, a mature student, are analysed through narrative inquiry; this approach uses a narrative as a means of capturing and analysing experience. In this case, Eliza’s stories about transition and transformation were collected over three years. Eliza made the transition from her “Access to HE course” to a degree programme in textiles. She was crossing a boundary between further and higher education, a time which could impact positively or negatively on her future achievements. The conclusions drawn from this study are not easily turned into generalisations or “truths” as they are contingent on the contexts in which the narratives were produced. Narrative is a representation of experience which is mediated by the social and cultural positions of the narrators and their audiences.

This study found that Eliza was confronted by many difficulties and misunderstandings around time management, pedagogy and assessment. Ineffective communication between Eliza and her tutors led to a growing frustration resulting in her considering leaving the course. Eliza’s institution sometimes seemed inflexible and was unable to respond effectively to her needs as a part-time student.

The implications for educators are that they should think about strategies for adapting to a diverse student body.

The previous experiences and backgrounds of “newcomers” should be celebrated rather than being perceived as “issues” that need to be fixed. In other words, when “non-traditional” students move through the stages of their education, their learning contexts may also need to be transformed.

John Locke′s political economy lends itself to conservative, liberal and radical interpretations that frame the conceptual ambiguities that still shape our debates over government′s proper economic functions. Suggests that “masculinity” was a powerful undercurrent in Locke′s thought which linked these ambiguities and makes them explicable. In short, Locke′s political economy was a “gendered” one which juxtaposed Enlightenment hopes that “manly” men could balance freedom and equality, labour and prosperity, and political order, to ancient misogynist fears that “effeminate” men caused chaos when freed from political constraints. Ultimately, Locke′s scepticism resulted in a heavy investment in political prerogative which has been parlayed into twentieth century political hegemony.

The purpose of this article is to, within the specific Sri Lankan figures on ageing within South Asia (comparatively high longevity and high figures on intergenerational family‐living), look into the interpretations of social care and everyday social life in urban elder homes in Colombo. What does everyday social life look like and how are underlying meanings of care given shape? To highlight the taken for granted quality of much of everyday care, comparisons are made on the basis of earlier ethnographic research by Indian scholars on Dutch senior homes.

The methodology relied on analysis of existing quantitative data on ageing in Sri Lanka and on research generated by the four‐year team‐study of which the author was part. Specific data in this article were collected through qualitative research by the author: regular visiting and participating in activities within certain selected homes in Colombo, over a period of four months. In addition survey data were collected on 55 senior homes in Colombo.

Against a background of available statistical data on ageing; family and institutional care, qualitative research findings are provided on everyday life within the Colombo homes, Sri Lanka. What kind of care (“Araksha kerime”) is given and/or aimed for? The concept of “social care” (Daly and Lewis) is the starting point to understand how normative and social frameworks within which “care” is understood and undertaken. Cross cultural comparison with every‐day life in Dutch senior homes articulates the impact of taken for granted socio‐cultural similarities and differences embedded in the concept of “senior home” and its everyday life.

The four year research project by three main researchers (of which the author was one) resulted in a substantial data base and several publications. This specific qualitative section of research is based in an additional period of four months of regular visiting of five selected Colombo elder homes. Survey data were collected on another 55 senior homes.

The points made in the paper could be constructively discussed cross culturally and contribute to a debate on the taken for granted underlying socio‐cultural meanings within which universal definitions of – in this case – care within senior homes is pursued cross culturally. Money does not always make all the difference.

The article attempts to combine data from different disciplines and compare different socio‐cultural settings for old‐age care. This can shed a different light on the taken‐for‐granted elements in the shaping the social life in senior homes. For example, it becomes clear why the causes of loneliness and isolation among elders in a certain setting seem so “natural” within and so strange from beyond.

The purpose of this article is to explore Maggie Kuhn's theoretical and analytical contributions to social gerontology and more broadly to the advancement of critical and public sociology.

This paper is an theoretical exploration of ageing. Maggie Kuhn's and the Gray Panthers theoretical contributions include analyses of, and related to: identity politics, intersectionality, cultural and media studies and the cognitive sciences, the forces and factors in the developing political economy of ageing including critiques of the ageing enterprise and the medical industrial complex, the sociology of knowledge of gerontology and globalization and world imperialism. The concluding section argues that the post‐retirement career of Maggie Kuhn was one of a Public Sociologist.

Maggie Kuhn fulfils the promise of the Project of Public Sociology, which “is to make visible the invisible, to make the private public, to validate these organic connections as part of our sociological life”. Maggie Kuhn's example moved forward the work of multiple generations of scholars. She lived and produced critical social analyses in pursuit of emancipatory knowledges. Her work is one of the earliest forms, if not the first, of critical pedagogy in gerontology; she promoted and advanced discourses of resistance. Maggie Kuhn was an engaged and outraged, practicing organic intellectual – the epitome of what bell hooks means by “teaching to transgress” and “education as the practice of freedom”. In the 24 years after her involuntary retirement, this was Maggie Kuhn's full‐time transformational agenda.

The paper looks at how the biography of Maggie Kuhn helped to engender the rise of radical social gerontology.