Invisible, unrecognised and undervalued: examining stories of unpaid work performed by older adults in their local neighbourhoods

Abstract

Abstract Over the past 40 years, positive ageing discourses that speak to an expectation of continued productivity have gained prominence within research and policy. Such discourses have been critiqued as placing disproportionate value on the extension of older adults' working lives, while obscuring other valuable forms of work performed by older adults. Despite the emergence of theoretical conversations about the expansion of conceptions of work, few studies have adopted an explicit focus on the work performed by older adults within their neighbourhoods. Informed by conceptions of work positioned at the intersection of critical gerontology and critical feminism, we drew upon qualitative data from a larger ethnographic study, generated from 17 participants aged 65 and older, to examine: (a) the various forms and contributions of unpaid work that older adults carry out at the neighbourhood level, and (b) the ways in which older adults' representations of this work relate to dominant notions of productivity. Specifically, each participant engaged in three types of qualitative interviews, including additional spatial and visual data generation: (a) completing a narrative interview; (b) carrying a small Global Positioning System (GPS) device to automatically log locations, completing an activity diary and a follow-up interview; and (c) participating in a go-along interview or a photo elicitation interview. Our findings highlight a range of unpaid work performed by participants in their neighbourhood, including formal volunteering, informal caring and informal civic participation. Although these forms of work were, at times, discussed by participants as enabling social inclusion, significant tensions arose from the general lack of discursive and social value assigned to them. In particular, participants described being subject to overwhelming expectations placed on older adults, and women in particular, to carry out this work, with little recognition or acknowledgement of their contributions to the neighbourhood. Taken together, our findings suggest the need not only to diversify understandings of the forms of work perceived as aligning with productive contributions to society in older age, but also to attend to the invisible work performed by older adults within their neighbourhoods. Additionally, we propose a variety of ways organisations and communities that benefit from older adults' unpaid labour may enhance accessibility, thereby reducing the work done by older adults to negotiate tensions between ableist expectations for productivity and their ageing bodies.