Aging and Retirement

Aging and retirement manifest themselves in many individual and household cases as instances of social problems not only to policy-makers and the political class, but also and more tellingly to the aging or the retirees themselves – as well as to their extended families and communities. These social problems transcend the usual mismatch between retirement benefits, if there be any such benefits, and the year-on-year, inflation-propelled rise in the cost of living and decline in the quality of senior life. They include: increasing physical immobility and loneliness, chronic pain, growing susceptibility to ill-health and medical emergencies, creeping blindness and loss of hearing, diminishing access to the basic needs (food/water, shelter, clothing and proper hygiene) that might have been previously available, declining capacity to maintain the requisite levels of personal care, and personal insecurity and fearfulness in local environments of rising crime levels. The Social Sciences team will establish methods and procedures for the systematic baselining, as well as continuing and long-term documentation and analysis of these problems and their related parameters. There will be a need, in all this, to partner with policy makers, employers, trade unions (COTU), NSSF and NHIF.

Diversity

Diversity refers to both the awareness of difference – cultural, racial, ethnic, class, age-related, religious, educational, national origin, physical ability, gender and marital status, among others – and the acknowledgement or acceptance of difference as an inescapable fact of public life in a growing number of countries. The Kenyan constitution itself touts diversity in various areas of public life, such as: appointments to public office, enrollment in institutions of learning and employment. However, the fit between the letter of the law and actual practice (or habit) is the subject of much debate. There is much room for knowledge-based (or informed) implementation strategies. In national settings, diversity is all about democracy-mediated inclusion. On a global scale, it is about emigration and (usually selective) immigration– that is to say, the selective issuing of visas. Diversity, in a world of randomly and thinly distributed arrays of crucial talent, is increasingly seen in influential circles as a source of national strength and competitive advantage.

Telling

Telling is a re-enactment or codification of that which we or others have observed, done and/or experienced. It is thus the summation, of sorts, of all of ontology’s four manifestations, including itself, and all that ontology means and makes possible. Often, we interrogate in order to narrate, and do tell (and thus affirm) by way of an interrogation. A good telling is a “closing of the loop”, and a hard thing to do. Fast-forward and you realize that, in a sense, ethnomethodology is a wonderful kind of telling. So is thick description. So is mythology and poetry and drama and the novel. History is a telling, in its dialectical as well as chronological renditions and traditions. The epic and all the sagas of the world are a telling. Music and painting are a telling, and so is sculpture. Monuments are a telling, too. And thus all stories are by definition already told.