Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee

As co-leader (together with Ruth Gehrmann) of the project “Best Agers/Best Places: Successful Aging and Spatial Human Differentiation,“ I am interested in how age-based differences are culturally and spatially produced in contemporary Western societies such as the United States.

Together with Ruth Gehrmann and Marlene Winkler, I examine three spaces in which “successful aging” is lived and presented in distinctive ways. My focus lies on university-based retirement communities: I investigate how university campuses can function as exclusive living environments for older adults, and analyze the role of “lifelong learning” as a selling point. Through interviews with operators and residents, I want to uncover how education and consumption merge into a new, potentially segregated model of aging.

What shapes me and my research?

In my research I deal with different forms of differentiation, with age difference as well as with other categories such as ethnicity or disability. I am also interested in how cultural processes of differentiation relate to categories of difference as they are created through medical discourses. Do cultural texts (e.g., autobiographies, novels, documentaries, social media) incorporate, resist, or reshape these categories? Interdisciplinary approaches such as Aging Studies and the Medical Humanities play an important role for me. In my book "Centenarians' Autobiographies: Age, Life Writing and the Enigma of Extreme Longevity" (De Gruyter, 2023; forthcoming), for example, I examine how centenarians rigorously reject the medicalization of longevity in their autobiographies and instead counter it with cultural narratives.

What has brought me to the CRC?

I was a member of the DFG research group "Un/Doing Difference", from which the CRC "Studies in Human Differentiation" emerged. At the same time, I was co-speaker of the DFG Research Training Group "Life Sciences, Life Writing: Boundary Experiences of Human Life between Biomedical Explanation and Lived Experience," until 2023, and within this framework I worked at the intersections between medicine and literature. As a professor at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, I am also primarily concerned with the question of how U.S. discourses shape European perceptions of differences and processes of differentiation, and what advantages and limitations such a transfer can entail.

Foto: Stephanie Füssenich