Geoff Childs, Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, is an anthropological demographer who uses the combined lenses of ethnography and demography in collaboration with scholars across disciplines to study long-term social changes across the Tibetan Plateau and Himalayan region. He is the author of several books including From a Trickle to a Torrent: Education, Migration, and Social Change in a Himalayan Valley of Nepal, co-authored with Namgyal Choedup (2019, University of California Press). At WashU he teaches courses on population, aging in cross-cultural perspective, and qualitative research methods.
Geoff’s current project, supported by the National Science Foundation, is titled Aging, Place, and Care: The Lives and Hopes of Himalayan Elders in an Age of Migration (co-PI Sienna Cragi, Dartmouth). The project is rooted in the recognition that global population aging is increasing in intensity, and the structures human communities have relied upon for generations to care for the elderly are cracking and shifting. Standard approaches in social gerontology bias Western perspectives on key concepts like ‘successful aging’, ‘aging in place’, and ‘elder care’ without interrogating how these vary cross-culturally. In recognition of this reality and the attendant issues it provokes, the overall research question is: How do individuals, families, communities, and institutions adapt to demographic and socioeconomic changes to allow people to age in a culturally appropriate manner? The question was developed in collaboration with and is of central concern to research interlocutors and partners, specifically, people from the ethnically Tibetan highlands of Nepal whose family members live between their natal communities, Kathmandu, and New York City.
