Maria Łuszczyńska - Ageing and COVID-19: Making Sense of a Disrupted World

COVID-19 brought an end to the world as we know it, and affected everyone, irrespective of ones position in the life course (Azzopardi et al. in press). For instance, at the start of the pandemic women who did not have a negative swab test were separated from their babies following birth ().

The COVID-19 pandemic is not devoid of ) Such impacts of COVID-19 on the lives of older persons were key instigators to the conceptualisation, planning and writing of the chapters herein in this manuscript.

Ageing and COVID-19: Making sense of a disrupted world is another attempt at seeking to understand the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on older persons and how public authorities and older people themselves reacted to the pandemic. While it certainly includes some overlap with other literature, this book contributes to ongoing discussion and research in four key ways.

First, and perhaps most importantly, the book includes many chapters which focus on non-English speaking countries (e.g. parts of Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany and Poland) that generally flew under the radar as far as policy and empirical studies on COVID-19 were concerned. The fact that the book does not include contributions from English-speaking countries is a positive approach in the efforts to de-colonise academic literature. The perils of globalisation biases and neo-liberal hegemony are really testing the established ethos and vision of COVID-19 related literature which is running the risk of experiencing academic imperialism, by being dominated by Western philosophies and modes of practice, and Eurocentric hegemonies as a way of knowing, seeing and understanding the pandemic. Such waves of ideological domination are both hidden and expressed, as they seek to reinforce past and present superiorities of Western social systems over others. This book counters such trends by focusing on Continental European trends in the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic together with one exposition on the island state of Malta.