Telling the Stories of Bodies

A social epidemiologic approach to health and aging provides a specific language for conceptualizing, investigating, and contributing novel understandings of the nature of aging. The integration of creative counterfactual thinking through a causal lens, life-course models, and cross-national comparisons allows social epidemiologists to critically examine the determinants of health and illness across diverse global contexts. These tools provide a foundation from which empirical evidence can be generated to reimagine what aging could look like in the future, under various revisions of global and local social structures around the world.