A ‘new materialist’ lens on aging well: Special things in later life

Aging well is a process of making sense of self and aging. Over the last two decades, researchers have studied how individuals make self-meaning through person–object relations. Much of this work has focused on how individuals assign meaning to special objects, yet little is known about the influence of the physicality of these things on this meaning-making. This paper introduces a “new materialist” lens to aging-well research by distilling and synthesizing key assumptions from diverse bodies of literature. Each assumption is illustrated with data from a recent series of interviews with older women. The paper demonstrates how this theoretical perspective may be applied to study the making of self-meaning through such later-life transitions as widowhood. A new materialist lens can enhance understanding of identity construction, and more broadly, aging well, in terms of later-life relationships with special things.