INTERDISCIPLINARITY GERONTOLOGY SOCIAL

Abstract

Approximately 20 years ago, when we started to study the aging process, academic research pointed to a geriatric knowledge that focused on diseases, fragilities, losses and death, which contradicted our daily experiences with older adults. The change in perspective was already a reality in developed countries, but in Brazil, only at the end of the 1980s did human aging start to be understood as a dynamic and multidimensional process. Studies focusing on the integral being with many types of old age were initiated, a panorama that was favorable to the implementation of Social Gerontology programs, thanks to the partnerships and articulations among professionals from specific disciplines, the basis for the adoption of the interdisciplinary perspective. Articulating varied disciplinary contents in gerontology requires a different posture of the researcher and teacher, as the being that ages has desires and hopes, physical and emotional fragilities, and cannot be seen unilaterally. The aim of the ethnographic documental analysis that is proposed here, which is part of a postdoctoral project in Social Gerontology, is to unveil and strengthen the interdisciplinary social gerontological knowledge, in the construction of the culture of a dignified and supportive longevity.