Other-wise old : becoming-a-response-able-ancestor with process ontology and nomadic subjectivity : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

Abstract

This project started off thought with the marginalisation of old and older women at the intersection of sexism and ageism, and resistance to the binary understanding of ageing as either decline, or successful ageing. Euro-US-centric knowledge production reproduces this binary that perpetuates the dominant single story of old people as deficit Other against ‘young’ as normative (Sandberg, 2013). Feminist psychology has not been attuned to the voices of old women (Mitchell & Bruns, 2011), while the harms inflicted through ageism have intensified (Baars, 2025). Whilst this was the starting point for this thesis, it was processual and indeterminate as it unfolded, and emerged as an inquiry into my own lived experiences with the purpose of reaching an adequate understanding of underlying power structures of domination and subordination embedded in conditions of an ordinary life. My narrative inquiry is grounded in my theoretical location that guides my process through specific ontological and epistemological commitments to process ontology and nomadic subjectivity that enable an understanding of ageing as constant differentiation. I engage a feminist politics of location in recognition that all knowledge is partial, limited, and perspectival, as I move to understand the difference of my ageing differently through critique and creativity. The text contained in this project aims to illustrate a process that prioritised affective flows of meaning making in the in-between of the gap between life and story (Fine, 2017), and as such it is a moment of being of becoming-with my storytelling as it unfolded (Tamboukou, 2008). The process affected me deeply, and my hope is for prompting other stories of embodied and embedded ageing that can collectively radiate outwards (Fine, 2017) to actualise the virtual of hopeful ageing futures where affirmative difference is recognised in our “living and dying well together” (Haraway, 2016, p, 29) in a journey of becoming-a response-able-ancestor.