FuturISE Plenary Panel at the ASC 2025

The FuturISE Consortium was part of the Aging & Social Change Conference 2025 in Norrköping with a plenary panel on “Ageing and the Polycrisis: Generations and Solidarity from the perspective of the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis”. The chair of the session, Mark Schweda, gave an introduction on “Crises in an Ethical Perspective – FuturISE”. Andreas Motel-Klingel presented key concepts of the FuturISE project under the title of “Ageing, life course and solidarity”. Followed by Patricia Donovan, who gave an insightful presentation (co-authored with Paul Higgs) on results from the UK media analysis in her talk on “The ‘baby boomer’ generation as a focus for intergenerational solidarity and/or conflict in the UK media”. Lena Dörmann and Eva Katharina Boser presented in their talk on “Perspectives on intergenerational relations regarding responsibility and solidarity during the COVID 19 pandemic in public discourse in Germany” (co-authored with Niklas Ellerich-Groppe) insight from the German media debates and the analysis of ethical recommendations and policy papers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, Nico Mira (co-authored with Lijun Peng) gave a presentation regarding “Risk, Age, and Solidarity: Intergenerational Responses in Sweden’s COVID-19 and Climate Crises” with conceptual clarifications and the discussion of the Swedish media sample.

The plenary panel was followed by an engaged Q&A session with the audience, which was of great value for further research in the project.

After the conference the FuturISE project group came together in a (hybrid) consortium meeting to discuss further material from the comparative empirical exploration.