Conference Program

The contribution approaches Ageing with Disability (AWD) not as a specialist topic, but as a critical lens. When duration truly enters the scene rather than remaining a biographical detail, core educational categories reveal their normative character. Development, conceived as cumulative progression; education, framed as preparation for adulthood; autonomy, equated with independence: these concepts hold only as long as the life course appears linear. AWD disrupts this linearity and compels theory to make explicit what usually remains implicit, the assumption that adulthood represents stability and dependency merely an incident to be corrected.

AWD compels us to acknowledge that vulnerability is not a deviation from a presumed “normal” course of life, but an ordinary dimension of human experience that may re-emerge or intensify along trajectories rarely unfolding in linear ways. From this awareness, it becomes difficult to treat autonomy as a boundary separating those deemed “fit” to participate in social contexts from those excluded. Such a distinction cannot be demonstrated or validated objectively; rather, its substance takes shape within the web of relationships and material conditions surrounding the person.

When discontinuity and fragmentation within service systems weaken support structures, choice may remain formally recognized yet lose substance in lived experience. It becomes a procedurally sound formulation that struggles to withstand the pressures of everyday life. Self-determination, though strongly affirmed in normative frameworks, risks remaining unprotected, asserted at the level of principles, yet fragile precisely at the moments when it most requires safeguarding.

AWD unsettles a long-standing and largely unexamined assumption, namely the idea that development coincides with an orderly progression in which competencies accumulate over time, as if life followed an upward trajectory. When attention shifts to lived realities and their dynamics, this image begins to falter and life paths reveal interruptions and discontinuities. At that point, attempts to reduce development to measuring what has been “accumulated” become inadequate, and a new urgency emerges: to understand what enables continuity to be sustained, and how transitions can be navigated without losing the supports holding experience together.

What ultimately makes the difference is not so much the increase in skills, nor their certification, but the possibility of remaining within the spaces that shape one’s life, dwelling, relationships, education, work, participation, even when circumstances fracture or reconfigure.

As long as the implicit normative horizon presupposes a linear, autonomous, stable life trajectory, largely free from disruption, vulnerability, dependency, ageing, and illness tend to be regarded as exceptions to be managed, or as problems to be contained or corrected. AWD redirects attention precisely to this point: not to what is declared, but to what endures over time. It compels us to ask whether a person is able to remain within social contexts, to make decisions, to participate, and not to be excluded when life becomes more fragile.