Old age and construction of projects: Between the time of the subject and the times of culture

Abstract

For almost thirty years, Universidad Nacional de San Luis has become the setting for the Program Elderly People (PAM, for its initials in Spanish), which offers people aged 60 and over courses and workshops that are renewed each year according to the interests of the participants. Belonging to this space places them as PAM students, which implies an institutional reference and, at the same time, it is a place inhabited in the first person that, as valuable as it is, is chosen and sustained as a terrain for the deployment of personal projects. Talking about old age means referring to a social construction, a discursive category of science and culture that throughout history has shaped perceptions and attitudes towards it. Likewise, talking about a subject in the time of old age entails addressing it in its singularity, in which the dimension of desire comes into play. Accounting for the complex network of social and singular reasons that make possible the opening of an educational space for older adults and their choice as a new starting point, always renewed, to move towards a future, constitutes the purpose of this work.