This special monograph issue builds on sociology of health and illness scholarship and expands the analytical lens to examine how old people, healthcare professionals, and technology designers create, use, and modify science and technology to negotiate and define health and illness. Far from passive consumers, elders are technogenarians, creatively utilising and adapting technological artefacts such as walking aids and medications to fit their needs. This publication adds theoretical and empirical depth to our understanding of the multiple and overlapping socio-historical contexts surrounding ageing bodies and ageing enterprises, including the biomedicalisation of ageing that includes the rise of anti-ageing or longevity medicine; and the rise of gerontechnology industries and professions -fields that largely accept the ageing body as a given. This collection sociologically investigates how and where these two trends overlap and diverge in relation to a global context of ageing and ageism, and calls for further scholarship in this area. Combining science and technology studies and sociology of health and illness frameworks together provides an empirical basis from which to analyse technogenarians in action, as well as the stakeholders and institutions involved in the ageing, health, and technology matrix.Keywords: ageism, ageing in place, anti-ageing medicine, gerontechnology, science and technology studies Science and technology are central to the lived experiences and normative definitions of health and illness for ageing people. From pharmaceuticals, to walking aids, to cell phones, old people interact with technologies and science on a daily basis. Everyday technologies as well as biomedical interventions can be part of the way older adults pursue, maintain, and negotiate life. In this way, old people are cyborgs in contemporary life, blending machine and biology in both their personal identities and their relations to the external world. This monograph builds on sociology of health and illness scholarship and expands the analytical lens to include the myriad ways old people interact with science and technology to negotiate health and illness. For elders, perceptions of health and illness may not be limited to acute illness experiences, but may include an everyday understanding of a changing state of health and wellbeing that is managed and made more tenable through the use of multiple, assistive technologies and environmental design modifications. Old individuals may rely on a range of everyday technologies such as stairway railings, phones, adjusted toilet seats, and walking aids to create safer spaces and maintain health and mobility. Elders may also

Autoimmune diseases include 80 or more complex disorders characterized by self-reactive, pathologic immune responses in which genetic susceptibility is largely insufficient to determine disease onset. In September 2010, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) organized an expert panel workshop to evaluate the role of environmental factors in autoimmune diseases, and the state of the science regarding relevant mechanisms, animal models, and human studies. The objective of the workshop was to analyze the existing data to identify conclusions that could be drawn regarding environmental exposures and autoimmunity and to identify critical knowledge gaps and areas of uncertainty for future study. This consensus document summarizes key findings from published workshop monographs on areas in which “confident” and “likely” assessments were made, with recommendations for further research. Transcribed notes and slides were reviewed to synthesize an overview on exposure assessment and questions addressed by interdisciplinary panels. Critical advances in the field of autoimmune disease research have been made in the past decade. Collaborative translational and interdisciplinary research is needed to elucidate the role of environmental factors in autoimmune diseases. A focus on exposure assessment methodology is needed to improve the effectiveness of human studies, and more experimental studies are needed to focus on causal mechanisms underlying observed associations of environmental factors with autoimmune disease in humans.

This article outlines a research agenda for a sociology of artificial intelligence (AI). The authors review two areas in which sociological theories and methods have made significant contributions to the study of inequalities and AI: (1) the politics of algorithms, data, and code and (2) the social shaping of AI in practice. The authors contrast sociological approaches that emphasize intersectional inequalities and social structure with other disciplines’ approaches to the social dimensions of AI, which often have a thin understanding of the social and emphasize individual-level interventions. This scoping article invites sociologists to use the discipline’s theoretical and methodological tools to analyze when and how inequalities are made more durable by AI systems. Sociologists have an ability to identify how inequalities are embedded in all aspects of society and to point toward avenues for structural social change. Therefore, sociologists should play a leading role in the imagining and shaping of AI futures.

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