AGE-C edits a special section on Ageing and Media for NECSUS: A breakdown of topics and articles

The first collective, traditional output coming for the work of AGE-C was published in December 2025. Co-edited by AGE-C postdoc members Luis Freijo and Asja Makarević, and PI Belen Vidal, the special resulted from a collaboration between our project and the Open Access journal NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, and focused on the intersection of ageing and media for its Autumn 2025 special thematic section.

This special section on ageing guest edited by AGE-C members comprises an Introduction written by the editors and seven research outputs, including six written articles and a videoessay. The larger NECSUS issue also contains in its data section the data paper which accompanies and explains the AGE-C dataset.

In the Introduction, Dr Freijo, Dr Makarević and Dr Vidal place the focus on the changing aspects of ageing, not understood as a monolithic euphemism to old age, but rather as “’a movement through time’, [which] is inherently bound to process, and therefore to narrative”. The authors relate the articles contained in the section to key issues of ageism, intergenerational conflict and gendered and imbalanced ageing that affect today’s global processes of moving through time, to conclude by bearing witness to a diverse of wealth of critical frameworks. These critical frameworks at the same time incorporate and expand the focus on gender studies that much investigation on ageing and media has entailed, to find temporal and spatial coordinates, quantitative methodologies, and hitherto unexplored themes at the crux of scholarly research on ageing.

In ‘Suplus Places and Lives?: Rethinking deindustrialisation and ageing in Casa de ningú and Nación’, Eva Álvarez Vázquez builds a comparison between dilapidated post-industrial spaces and ageing communities in the two Iberian documentaries featured in the title. Álvarez Vázquez exerts a critique of the neoliberal political rationality that renders both of these spaces as derelict, ruined and redundant due to its lack of productivity, and explores how the aesthetic strategies of both films recover the bodies and spaces of the inhabitants of the declining industrial town and the care home as embedded in a collective history of labour struggle in Spain’s twentieth-century history.

Yusi Chang also engages with issues of ageing and collective memory in ‘Negotiating identity through Zhuangzian philosophy: Dementia narratives in Chinese cinema’. The exploration of memory is in this case related to the representation of dementia against a larger context of Chinese history. Chang moves away from a conception of dementia as the ultimate failure to age well and utilises Zhuangzhian philosophy to discuss two recent films from mainland China, a national cinema which has not been discussed systematically in relation to ageing in Anglophone scholarship. Chang argues that in Song of Spring and The Cord of Life, the forgetting associated with dementia allows for the resurfacing of collective trauma that continues to haunt contemporary Chinese cultural identity, while also enabling the recollection of a more authentic sense of self and home. Forgetfulness, as per Zhuangzi, transcends the fixed binary of remembering and forgetting, challenging the dominant Western privileging of memory.

In addition, AGE-C’s Gloria Dagnino contributes ‘Representing older adults in intergenerational conflict in contemporary Italian cinema, between generational and family master narrative’, which applies quantitative methodologies to the representation of older adults, intergenerational conflict, and the family master narrative in contemporary Italian cinema. Using the AGE-C dataset as a point of reference, Dagnino observes how stories of intergenerational conflict remain largely confined to the familial sphere and resolved via melodrama and comedy conventions. What’s more, the generationalist representation of older adults precludes the visibility of intersectional factors such as gender and class, which indicates the successes and the limitations of how Italian cinema imagines ageing and intergenerational relations in the post-2008 crisis national context.

In ‘The ageing female body between feminist video art and horror cinema’, Rossana Galimi connects the media histories of second-wave feminist video art and contemporary women’s horror cinema, proposing that the female body is interrogated in both contexts through comparable frameworks of surveillance, control and precarious visibility. The article in this way follows a tradition of scholarly work on gender, ageing and media, but includes in the dialogue feminist video practice, which is repurposed and updated when placed in conversation with contemporary films such as The Substance.

Matthew Hilborn follows as well an overall framework of gender enquiries, in this case focused on masculinity and baldness, in ‘A high price toupee: The cost of baldness in Por los pelos’. Proposing a ‘post-hair’ cultural critique, Hilborn surveys a wide array of cultural texts (most notably, the film comedy Por los pelos [Nacho G. Velilla, 2022]) that perform baldness as the source of humour and pathologising narratives, veering between the exploitation of fragile ageing masculinities and self-acceptance under the logic of neoliberal consumerism, embodied agency, and self-care. Mobilised for screen comedy (and male heroics), baldness points at the disruption of the linear life course through the disruption of linear hair-growth timelines. Hilborn unpacks balding and baldness as visual indexes of the masculine ageing process, revealing the mixture of complicity and critique that underlies its representation in contemporary media culture.

Connecting with several of the topics of the special section, Stefan Schweigler looks at the effects of ageist representations and considers them in relation to the genre of ‘old people pranks’ on TikTok in ‘”Old people pranks” on TikTok: Remediating digitality with the fear of old age’. Schweigler discusses how non-fiction video clips made by younger people in which they make fun of older people, irritating or terrifying them, are framed as a social media practice in an ageist manner, presented as an unproblematic form of smartphone-based mockery. The article becomes the intersection of a complex net of case studies in social media and linear television, and of critical frameworks that include cultural gerontology, remediation and hauntology. Schweigler suggests perceiving the video pranks as a digital practice that reinforces privileged and hegemonic youth positions against the assumed specter of a ‘silver tsunami’, which rejects the ethical potentials of a Derridean hauntology and makes the search for an intergenerational cohabitation all the more urgent.

Finally, the special section includes a research videoessay by Barbara Zecchi, ‘(R)AGE: Ageing and Raging in the Cinemas of the Global South’, which invites viewers into the silent, powerful presence of older women’s rage as expressed in four postcolonial films. Avoiding conventional tropes of cathartic outburst, the video frames rage as silent, sustained resistance, which unfolds through aesthetic choices rooted in slow pacing and visual echoes. Zecchi deploys a practice of presbyoempathic visuality, a mode of looking that lingers with ageing

bodies rather than looking past them. The work does not argue about these women; it watches with them, inviting viewers into a different rhythm of cinematic attention.

As Freijo, Makarević and Vidal claim, “the main objective of this special section is not only to state and bear witness to the momentum in the field, but also to create space for diverse ways of approaching ageing across methods, subjects and media”.

Written by: Dr. Luis Freijo