Special Issue: “Rethinking neighborness”

Guest editor: Olga Brednikova, Center for Independent Social Research

In the changing world, neighbor relations acquire new meanings, functions, forms, and spectrums. Mobility, automation, and technology that makes people interaction more indirect, influence the way the rules of neighborness are shaped. In the current issue dedicated to this topic, we look at diverse forms and formats of neighborness in contemporary cities. We are interested to determine how the practices and the culture of neighboring are changing over the course of time; how neighbor relations are transforming and how sustainable the forms of neighbor interactions are in the framework of changing structural conditions and contexts. The main objective of the issue is to bring the study of neghborness to new limits – beyond familiar approaches of urban sociology, concepts of solidarity and communication, all of which consider it a sustainable community, connected by a network of relationships. Instead, we would like to offer new methodological, thematical, and disciplinary perspectives towards analyzing neighborness.

Guest editors: Julia Zelikova, associate professor at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, and Elena Bogdanova, associate professor at the European University in St. Petersburg|research fellow at the Centre for Independent Social Research|associate professor at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration
Aging is an inevitable process and stage of human life, which is increasingly attracting the attention of scholars in social sciences. Newly emerging social, cultural, medical, and media discourses interpret differently the changes that occur in the human body at the physical and mental levels. Some of them pathologize processes that were previously considered natural and contribute to their medicalization. Others, on the contrary, try to normalize the process of aging and to incorporate the elderly as actors into processes of production and consumption.
A major goal of this special issue of Laboratorium is to consider the phenomenon and process of aging critically and make visible those cultural practices and discourses that produce contemporary interpretations of aging. The issue will bring together scholarship on aging from various social and historical contexts, which problematizes different conceptualizations and representations of old age. The aim of the special issue is to develop better understanding of the socio-cultural meanings embedded in the notions of old age and to produce theoretically informed and methodologically sound interpretations of them.