Building Back Better: Going Big with Emancipatory Sciences

ABSTRACT

This commentary argues that precarity and inequity across the life course and aging has accelerated via the COVID-19 pandemic. President Biden’s vaccination efforts, $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, and Build Back Better framework reflect a paradigm shift to restore faith and trust in government that boldly confronts entrenched austerity ideologues. We offer emancipatory sciences as a conceptual framework to analyze and promote social structural change and epic theory development. Emancipatory sciences aim to advance knowledge and the realization of dignity, access, equity, respect, healing, social justice, and social change through individual and collective agency and social institutions. Epic theory development moves beyond isolated incidents as single events and, instead, grasps and advances theory through attempts to change the world itself by demanding attention to inequality, power, and action. Gerontology with an emancipatory science lens offers a framework and vocabulary to understand the individual and collective consequences of the institutional and policy forces that shape aging and generations within and across the life course. It locates an ethical and moral philosophy engaged in the Biden Administration’s approach, which proposes redistributing – from bottom-up – material and symbolic resources via family, public, community, and environmental benefits.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalism
• democracy
• emancipatory gerontology
• emancipatory sciences
• neoliberalism
• patriarchy
• The state

Key points

• Emancipatory sciences are a lens to investigate intergenerational inequities.

• Old age and social policies are limited by neoliberalism’s market logics.

• Emancipatory legislation responds to rage and despair by envisioning hope.

• Build Back Better pledges to restore faith and trust in the “whole-of-government.”

• Collective consciousness is a communal pathway to the moral basis of social healing.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the UCSF Emancipatory Sciences Lab as a creative collective that inspires this work, and the living legacy of the late, great Maggie Kuhn, whose Gray Panthers continue to lead the fight for and into old age. UCSF sits upon the traditional unceded lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported that there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.