MIRIAM BERNARD (BA, PhD) is Professor of Social Gerontology at Keele University. She first came to Keele as a student in the early 1970s, graduating with a Combined Honours degree in Geography and English (with subsidiaries in Psychology and Geology). After a year spent working and travelling abroad, she returned to carry out her doctorate which explored the leisure patterns and lifestyles of young couples. She commenced working with older people in 1982 when she was appointed as Research Officer for the Beth Johnson Foundation. During her six years at the Foundation, she was involved in evaluating a variety of innovative projects including the Potteries Elderly Support Group and the Self Health Care in Old Age Project, as well as initiatives funded under the government's ‘Rising Tide' programme for the care of mentally frail older people.
In 1988, Mim returned to Keele to join the academic staff of the Adult Education Department and help set up the first PG Diploma/Masters courses in Gerontology outside London. She was Director of the programmes for seven years between 1991 and 1998, maintaining her links with the voluntary sector as Chair of the North Staffordshire Association of Carers Support Groups and as a Member and Governor of the Centre for Policy on Ageing. During this same period, she was also on the National Executive Committee of the British Society of Gerontology and, since 1993, has been an Associate Fellow of The Local Government Centre at Warwick. In 1997 she became Review Editor (with her colleague Judith Phillips) of Ageing and Society : the premier British academic journal in the field; was appointed Head of the Department of Applied Social Studies in 1998 and, following reconfiguration, Head of the new School of Social Relations. Mim is currently on the Editorial Board of the 'Journal of Intergenerational Relationships: programs, policy and research'.
For the last twenty years Mim's research interests have been primarily oriented around the development of new and healthy lifestyles in later life, and she has a long-standing interest in women's lives as they age.
ALEXANDRE KALACHE (MD, PhD, FRCPH) is a medical doctor, originally from Rio de Janeiro, who studied for his MSc degree (Social Medicine) and PhD degree (Cancer Epidemiology) in Brazil.
Since 1995 he has acted as the Head of the Ageing and Life Course Programme (ALC) at the World Health Organization. ALC activities are designed to advance the state of knowledge about health care in older age and gerontology through dissemination of information, training and research efforts. ALC special focus is on the development of policies reflecting the 'WHO Active Ageing framework'.
Previously, Dr Kalache served as founder and head of the Epidemiology of Ageing Unit at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), where from 1984 to 1995, he launched a series of international short courses on the implications for Public Health of population ageing. These courses were subsequently replicated by several countries resulting in the establishment of global network of researchers under his coordination. While at the LSHTM, Dr Kalache was also responsible for setting up, in 1991, the first European MSc course on Health Promotion. The framework adopted for this initiative was subsequently used as a base for the development of the WHO Programme he now coordinates which is firmly centred on a healthy ageing/life course perspective.
From 1978 - 1984 Dr Kalache was a clinical lecturer at the Department of Community Health, Oxford University. In 1978 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health, Royal College of Physicians, London. Dr Kalache first became interested in ageing issues while studying for his Master of Science degree in Social Medicine at the University of London (1975‑1977). His PhD thesis (University of Oxford) was on breast cancer epidemiology. Early in his career, after his medical graduation in Rio de Janeiro, his home town, Dr Kalache was an assistant lecturer in clinical medicine with a special interest ion infectious diseases and on medical education.
GRAHAM D. ROWLES is a social geographer with an interest in the humanistic tradition who for the past 30 years has focused his research on the geography of aging and the aged. A primary emphasis of this work has been exploring the changing relationship between elders and their environment. He has studied elders in an inner city environment, in rural Appalachia and in a variety of residential and institutional settings. He is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education, serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences and is President Elect of the Southern Gerontological Society. His publications include Prisoners in Space? Exploring the Geographical Experience of Older People, and four co-edited volumes, Aging and Milieu: Environmental Perspectives on Growing Old, Qualitative Gerontology, Long-term Care for the Rural Elderly, and Qualitative Gerontology (2nd Edition): A Contemporary Perspective, in addition to more than 60 book chapters and articles. Dr Rowles has served on the West Virginia Commission on Aging Intra State Funding Formula Committee, on the Kentucky Division of Aging services State-wide Housing Initiative Steering Committee, on the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission on Aging and the Workforce, and as a consultant to the United States Veteran's Administration on issues of deinstitutionalization.
Ongoing research includes a study of institutional permeability in long-term care that involves longitudinal survey research in 60 nursing and assisted living facilities and in-depth ethnographic research in four of these facilities (funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality). From 1985 until 2004 he served as Associate Director of the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging before assuming his current position as Director of the Graduate Center for Gerontology.
TONY BENN, born in 1925, is the longest serving Labour MP ever. He was a Member of Parliament (apart from two short interruptions) for over 50 years. He was first elected in November 1950 for the Bristol South East seat. He retired from his Chesterfield constituency at the time of the 2001 general election, claiming that retirement allowed him to devote more time to politics. In October 2007, at the age of 82, he offered himself as a prospective Labour candidate for the Kensington and Chelsea constituency.
One of the short interruptions in his parliamentary career was caused by becoming a peer following the death of his father in November 1960. Though disqualified from taking up his seat, he fought the consequent by-election in May 1961 and was returned by the voters of South East Bristol. An election court ruled that the runner up should serve as the constituency MP. Tony Benn had been trying to abandon his peerage for some time and continued to campaign. As a result of sustained pressure, the law was changed by the Peerage Act 1963 which allowed for the renunciation of peerages. He was the first to take advantage of the legislation. The runner up in the May 1961 by-election resigned and in the ensuing August 1963 by-election, Tony Benn regained the seat, which he held until it was abolished by boundary changes twenty years later in 1983. 25 years later the British Society of Gerontology welcomes him warmly to its 2008 conference in Bristol.
This Bristol story captures some of the qualities of the man – principled, yet irreverent. Tony Benn has always been on the left of the Labour Party and chaired it in 1973. It is said that he is one of very few former government ministers who have become more radical after leaving office. He advocates and engages with grassroots politics, with ideas of industrial democracy and of republicanism. His replacement of the monarchy by a commonwealth underpinned his suggestion (not implemented), whilst Postmaster General in the Wilson government of the 1960s, that stamps should be issued without using the Queen’s head.
Tony Benn held a number of ministerial posts. He became Minister of Technology in July 1966 until the June 1970 general election which was won by the Conservatives. When the Labour Party was returned to power in 1974, he first became Secretary of State for Industry but partly because of his vociferous opposition to UK membership of the European Community, he subsequently moved to become Secretary of State for Energy until the May 1979 general election. His long period in office convinced him of the weaknesses of parliamentary representative democracy, having witnessed the influence on UK government policy of industrialists, bankers and bodies like the International Monetary Fund. His radicalism in the 1980s and since found favour with Labour Party activists, so when his Bristol South East seat was abolished in 1983 and he failed to win the Bristol East seat, he was quickly elected at an early by-election in Chesterfield on 1 March 1984.
As well as continuing his opposition to the bureaucratic and centralised European Union, including support in 2007 for a referendum in the UK on the Reform Treaty, Tony Benn has publicly supported the unification of Ireland, reintroduction of the nationalisation of key industries, abolition of the House of Lords, and the 1984-85 miners’ strike. He has been, and remains, very active in the anti-war movement, opposing the sending of the Falklands task force, the first Gulf war and the invasion of Iraq. In 2004, he was elected the first president of the Stop the War Coalition.
His post-parliamentary career has also included a one-person stage show, in which his key message is that globalisation is undermining traditional social democratic values and key decisions are being taken by bodies unaccountable to the electorate. Tony Benn began publishing his diaries in 1988 and the eighth volume ‘More Time for Politics: Diaries 2001-2007’ came out in October 2007. Other of his 20 publications have included Levellers and the English Democratic Tradition (1976), Arguments for Socialism (1980), Common Sense: New Constitution for Britain (with Andrew Hood) (1993), Free Radical: New Century Essays (2004) and Dare to be a Daniel: Then and Now (2005). At the 2008 Conference of the British Society of Gerontology we look forward to hearing his views on Sustainable Futures in an Ageing World.