Cultural narratives and representations in Swedish law and media regarding age discrimination

• This paper explores narratives on ageing in age discrimination court cases and how they are represented in media. Sweden is a welfare state, considered good place to grow old, ranked No 3 in Global Agewatch Index 2015. However, Sweden was one of the last countries in EU to adopt legislation against age discrimination. Age has been a ground for discrimination since 2009, and so far very few cases have been brought to action. These cases, together with the media coverage of the cases, and the newspaper reporting on the role of the Discrimination Ombudsman (DO), are the empirical material. The research questions are: -What narratives of age and employment become visible in the texts? -What other factors interacts with age, such as gender, profession and ethnicity? -How does these representations relate to the ongoing challenge to society labour availability for older people and the use/misuse of their human capital and competences? The approach is interdisciplinary and takes its starting point in the capability concept used in the transdisciplinary research platform Centre for Ageing and Health, AgeCap, at the University of Gothenburg. Capability can refer to the individual’s ability to perform actions in order to reach goals he or she has reason to value. Here, in this paper. Focus is on factors on a macro level; application of laws that affect working older people and representations of media of these issues. Together they form narratives of ageing and ageism (i.e. the relation between perceptions of age and discriminatory practices).

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Juridik -- Juridik och samhälle (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Law -- Law and Society (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Ageing

aging

journalism

age discrimination

Discrimination Act

Agecap

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)