'Ageing well': Discursive constructions of ageing and health in the public reach of a national longitudinal study on ageing.

Established in 2006, the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) investigates the health, economic and social circumstances of a nationally-representative sample of people aged fifty years and older in a series of biennial data collection waves. Irish newspapers have been reporting the results of TILDA for over a decade and a half, and their texts represent reports of scientific research distilled through the pen of journalists. In their totality, their texts constitute a public discourse on ageing and health. Using critical discourse analysis, we examined the discourse within the texts of a purposive sample of two national daily newspapers. As sites of public discourse, newspapers reflect social life and are influential in forming and legitimating public attitudes. Like other sites of discourse, their language-in-use is contextually located, is rarely neutral and may employ strategies to discursively construct, sustain and privilege particular social identities, including ageing identities. Discursively constructed as 'ageing well', our analysis of newspaper texts revealed a discernible meta-discourse on ageing and health in which ageing was framed as a life course stage that may be cultivated, diligently self-nurtured and exploited for its positive aspects. When considered in light of literature on health and social inequalities, the consequences of this broadly positive ageing discourse can, somewhat perversely, frame older adults in unintended negative ways, including homogenising them and attributing to them capacities for ageing well that they may not possess. Discursively constructing older adults as a social and economic resource can also impose unrealistic expectations on them and may legitimise exploitation and demonstrate how normative ideologies of ageism and ableism are conveyed through legitimising language. Despite these potentially unintended consequences, the available media resources associated with TILDA may represent one of the most important contributions of the study, in terms of informing positive public attitudes towards ageing.

Blending Martial Arts and Yoga for Health: From the Last Samurai to the First Odaka Yoga Warrior.

This paper introduces the case study of Odaka Yoga, an innovative style of postural yoga blended with martial arts elements which emphasizes the importance of practitioners' health and processes of self-transformation as pivotal to the school's ethos. More specifically, the paper explores how Odaka Yoga's philosophical backdrops and practical repertoire, composed by a mixture of "exotic" resources such as Bushido, zen, yoga, and a constant reference to the ocean waves and biomechanics, constitute a very specific vision of health at the intersection of Western science and esoteric knowledge. Theoretically, the paper borrows from Jennings' theory of martial creation and enriches it with some of the central analytical tools proposed by theorists such as Bourdieu and Foucault. Methodologically, it relies on a multimodal approach including discursive analysis of the school's promotional materials, interviews with the founders and other key teachers, and observant participation of practitioners' apprenticeship processes. More Specifically, this paper discusses the birth of Odaka Yoga as occurring at the intersection of Asian martial arts and yoga, as well as the founders' biographical trajectories from the world of competitive martial arts and fitness, to yoga; it then turns to an examination of Odaka Yoga's conception of health as a mixture of the Western biomedical model and the subtle body model of Asian traditions such as yoga and martial arts. It argues that the conception of health promoted by this school gives rise to the Odaka Yoga Warrior, the ideal-typical practitioner whose body is simultaneously exposed to the medical gaze and its imperatives of control, knowledge, and manipulation; while it also deifies it, as it is animated by the elusive flows of energy (qi or prana) that prolonged practice aims to master. The paper concludes with a reflection on hybrid conceptions of health and the ubiquitous role of health discourses and narratives across sociocultural domains.