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Plenary Speakers

We are delighted to share our first confirmed plenary speakers:

  1. Professor Phyllis Moen 
  2. Professor Judith Phillips (OBE)
  3.  Professor Cathrine Degnen

Professor Phyllis Moen

Phyllis Moen is a life course scholar interested in the unequal health, well-being, and social inclusion effects of the mismatch between 20th century timetables, clocks and calendars shaping work, careers, retirement, and the gendered life course on the one hand, and rapidly changing 21st century technologies, risks and realities, on the other. She publishes widely in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals, and has received multiple life-time achievement awards. Professor Moen has written, edited, or coauthored ten books. Her two most recent (award-winning) books are: Encore Adulthood; Boomers on the Edge of Risk, Renewal, and Purpose, and Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do About It (with Erin Kelly). She is currently drawing on natural experiment and randomized feild experiment designs to capture inequalities in both the harmful and salutary stress, health, behavioural, and family impacts of changing organizational policies around working times and places, including flexible work, remote work, and the four-day workweek. Dr Moen holds the McKnight Presidential Chair and is a Distinguished Research Scholar at the University of Minnesota. She is also Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota and Cornell University, as well as fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Gerontological Society of America, and the National Council of Family Relations. 

Professor Judith Phillips OBE

Professor Judith Phillips (OBE) is a leading researcher in the field of social, behavioural, and environmental aspects of ageing, who has contributed to advancing the field of gerontology, theoretically and empirically and has guided UK policy and practice on ageing issues. She has been recognised internationally through several awards and was recognised for her contribution to social work/social care when awarded the OBE for Services to Older People.

She has extensive senior leadership experience and is currently Deputy Principal (Research) at the University of Stirling where she is responsible for the strategic direction of research at the University. Alongside her leadership roles she has maintained an active research career and is currently Research Director for the UKRI Healthy Ageing Challenge supporting the aim to help people remain active, productive, independent and socially connected across generations for as long as possible. 

Professor Cathrine Degnen

Professor Cathrine Degnen is an anthropologist whose research is focus on how people create meaning and make sense of their social worlds in context of social transformation. She has explored this central interest in two key empirical areas: older age and everyday life, and the anthropology of Britain. Within these two main fields, she has examined in closer details issues including personhood and the self; identity, belonging and social memory; temporality; and the creative affordances of place. Recent collaborative ethnographic research with colleagues at the University of Exeter, funded by the ESRC, has offered her the chance to begin to think about intergenerational relations of solidarity and of dispute via the lens of Covid19 and Brexit, two extraordinary- and simultaneously occurring- processual events. She has also enjoyed building a second recent body of work with Professor Katie Brittain (Newcastle) on everyday experiences of lives lived with dementia.