While I was working on this very description, a friend and colleague shared a BBC article reporting that Japan experienced its steepest annual population decline in 2024, with 908,574 more deaths than births. Japanese population shrinking – a “quiet emergency” in the words of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba — serves as a stark reminder that the global phenomenon of population aging is an ongoing reality. We are currently witnessing an unprecedented demographic reversal: according to United Nations projections (2001, 2019, 2022), by 2050, the number of older persons (aged 65 and above) will, for the first time, surpass the number of adolescents and youth (aged 15 to 24).

As a complex global issue, population aging presents significant aesthetic and representational challenges, comparable to those Timothy Clark associates with environmental crises (2019). While many of these challenges remain unresolved, old age has become increasingly prominent in cultural production. Since the turn of the 21st century, aging has emerged as a pervasive theme in world literature, a shift that has prompted a notable rise in critical engagement (Aghacy, 2020; Armengol, 2021; Barry & Vibe Skagen, 2020; Concilio, 2018; du Toit, 2013; Hobbs, 2016; Sako, 2022; Taberner, 2013). This prominence is especially visible in Anglo-American popular culture, where the so-called “silvering of the screen” has resulted in older actors and actresses taking on leading roles in Hollywood productions (Chivers, 2011).

These cultural texts offer valuable insights into the multifaceted implications of global aging and its entanglements with geographic, social, and cultural contexts. Moving beyond deterministic understandings of aging as a purely biological process, the interdisciplinary fields of Literary Gerontology and Aging Studies have provided robust theoretical frameworks for analyzing later life. Aging has emerged as a critical lens through which to analyze a broad range of human experiences and discourses, including embodiment, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, desire, identity, self, temporality, reproductivity, intergenerational dynamics, care, affect, labor, intimacy, family, friendship, medicalization, health, illness, death, memory, technology and reinvention.

Engaging with these themes, this seminar seeks to explore the aesthetic challenges of representing global aging and to examine productive tensions and intersections between the subjective experience of aging and its global dimensions across literary traditions and media forms. It aims to interrogate competing and coexisting conceptualizations of aging—for instance, aging as an embodied experience vs. aging as a transnational phenomenon. We invite papers that engage with these issues through literary, filmic, or theoretical analysis, as well as comparative approaches, contributing to an expanded understanding of aging in the contemporary world.