More-than-representational approaches to the life-course

ABSTRACT This paper proposes bringing together work on the life-course and more-than-representational theories as one way to extend and complement current approaches to ageing research. Drawing on ethnographic research with older people in Manchester, UK, I argue that research on ageing should better foreground those less-tangible, temporal dynamics of experience which are often overlooked. Understanding the life-course through more-than-representational theories complicates any clear sense of chronological time, illuminating the ways in which the life-course mediates the present in unexpected and expected ways. Specifically, I foreground differentiated capacities to affect and be affected across places, times and individual life-courses. This framing not only disrupts reductive narratives of older age, but also shows how more-than-representational theories are important to thinking about temporality. Through accounts developed with older people, rather than on them, I demonstrate the ways in which the identities and stories encountered are mediated by the research context. Future research on ageing must foreground the multiplicities and practices of older peoples’ embodied experience whilst keeping sight of the performative effects of representations. There is a need to more-thoroughly explore the overlaps between more-than-representational theories and the life-course to further develop relational geographies of ageing.

Enfoques más-que-representacionales en el ciclo de vida Cet article propose de rassembler les travaux sur les parcours de vie et les théories plus-que-représentationnelles afin d'élargir et de compléter les approches actuelles de la recherche liée au vieillissement. À partir de recherches ethnographiques menées avec des personnes âgées à Manchester au Royaume-Uni, je suggère que la recherche sur le vieillissement mériterait à mettre en relief ces dynamiques temporelles et peu tangibles de l'expérience qui sont souvent négligées. Comprendre le parcours de vie à travers les théories plus-que-représentationnelles complique toute conception du temps chronologique et éclaire les façons attendues ou inattendues selon lesquelles la durée de vie impacte le présent. En particulier, je souligne les aptitudes différenciées à affecter et à être affecté à travers les lieux, les époques et les parcours individuels. Ce cadrage non seulement bouleverse les discours réducteurs sur la vieillesse mais montre également en quoi les théories plus-que-représentationnelles importent pour penser la temporalité. Au travers de témoignages développés avec des personnes âgées, plutôt que sur eux, je montre les façons dont les identités et les récits sont influencées par le contexte de la recherche. La recherche de demain sur la vieillesse doit scruter les multiplicités et les pratiques des expériences vécues par les personnes âgées tout en gardant à l'esprit les effets performatifs des représentations. Il est nécessaire d'explorer plus minutieusement les chevauchements entre les théories plus-quereprésentationnelles et les parcours de vie pour développer davantage les géographies relationnelles de la vieillesse. basement they even had a lake with venetian gondolas!'. Admiring the grandeur of the old building, Fiona explained, 'I like to take photographs of the old buildings, and last time I did, I asked if I could go to the top floors of Lewis's to reminisce, but I wasn't allowed. I always look up at the old architecture when I come to town, that's the city that I know'.
The above account was taken from material collected during a three-year research project in Manchester, UK. It illustrates the 'more-than-representational' dynamics of the ageing process and how these entwine with different aspects of the life-course and senses of place in older age. In these encounters, the individual and collective pasts and futures that are enveloped into the 'now' are brought into dialogue. It shows how experiences from earlier in the life-course mediate and sustain engagements with the city in the present. Punctuated with nostalgic reminiscences, recalled memories and practices, the vignette demonstrates how more-than-representational dynamics are folded into encounters, 1 sensory stimulations and embodied dispositions.
Whilst geographers have begun to observe such dynamics, there is an identified need for geographers working on ageing to foreground the varied ways in which short and long term, individual and collective dynamics from throughout life-courses feature in everyday life (Hopkins & Pain, 2007;Schwanen, Hardill, & Lucas, 2012;Skinner, Cloutier, & Andrews, 2015). Indeed, it has been argued that the life-course approach, as is currently mobilised in Human Geography, tends to prioritise an 'ordered [. . .] safe [. . . and] staged chronology that does not account for delay [s], multipl [icity], revers[als] and uncertainty' (Hörschelmann, 2011, p. 379). However, geographic research on life-course transitions has illuminated the often-complicated ways in which transitionsfrom youth to adulthood, for instancecan unfold (Hopkins, 2006;Valentine, 2003). Nonetheless, I argue that work on transitions tends to focus on key life events at the expense of the multitude of often-overlooked, more-than-representational ways in which the life-course mediates everyday life.
There is a small, but growing literature on ageing within Human Geography, with pronounced interest over the past decade (Andrews, 2017;Skinner et al., 2015). Responding to the cultural turn and inspired by the relational and more-thanrepresentational turns within human geography, the past two decades have seen geographies of ageing scholars begin to rethink how they conceive of, and study, ageing as relational and processual. An emphasis has been placed upon life-course, diversity, practice and place (Eck & Pijpers, 2017;Lager, Van Hoven, & Huigen, 2016). Nonetheless, geographical research on ageing remains somewhat broad-brush, with Skinner et al. (2015) arguing for future research to foreground the specificity and intricacy of relations amidst older people and place. Rather than simply pointing out the existence of relations, research needs to 'describe richly' the complex nature of these relations and their consequences on experiences of place from across the life-course (Schwanen et al., 2012;Skinner et al., 2015, p. 788). Scholars have suggested that incorporating relational and more-than-representational perspectives can help respond to this need and strengthen research on ageing (Andrews, Milligan, Phillips, & Skinner, 2009;Skinner et al., 2015).
The empirics shared in this paper were developed with older people in Chorlton and the City Centre of Manchester between 2014 and 2016. The project was concerned with understanding how older people relate with place and participants were asked to share areas of significance through photo-walks. It was only through ongoing reflection that I came to realise how significant the life-course was in mediating the everyday. There is an established and varied literature in Geography surrounding place-making and the ways places are constituted through ordinary encounters (Darling & Wilson, 2016;Hetherington, 2003). Indeed, geographers have considered the interrelatedness of place as people age, but they have not explicitly considered how this relationality interfaces with individual life-courses and with the more-than-representational. In this paper, place is not understood as something that is 'out there' waiting to be researched. Rather, place and age are understood as entwined in geographically differentiated ways, forever being remade and always in-relation (Schwanen et al., 2012).
More-than-representational theories have 'become an umbrella term for diverse work that seeks to better cope with our self-evidently more-than-human, more-than-textual, multisensual worlds' (Lorimer, 2005, p. 83). The more-than-representational approach 2 advanced in this paper keeps sight of both the representational (discursive) and the lived, acknowledging how both are imbricated within, and emergent from, different geo-historical contexts and individual life-courses. Specifically, I argue that bringing the life-course into conversation with more-than-representational theories foregrounds the process, change and the constant reshuffling of relations that it comprises. In doing so, I invite a more nuanced understanding into the relational temporalities of the life-course than has been done thus far and offer a way of disrupting how older people are commonly represented. Such an approach should not be taken as an attempt to unearth obscure counter clichés of ageingalthough it maybut rather, it should be seen as a foregrounding of the different lived experiences of older people regardless of whether or not these experiences fit representational norms.
I provide a framework through which to consider how ageing research might be approached from a more-than-representational perspective. Through empirics, I demonstrate why the bringing together of more-than-representational theories and the life-course is a valuable approach to take for the geographies of ageing field. In doing so, this paper broadens interdisciplinary debates concerning ageing, relationality and the life-course (Hopkins & Pain, 2007;Horton & Kraftl, 2008;Skinner et al., 2015).
The paper is organized into five sections. The first section offers a review of relevant work within 'geographies of ageing' before reviewing studies of the life-course and introducing a body of work that might be broadly defined as more-than-representational in sections two and three. Specifically, I suggest the bringing together of more-than-representational theories and the life-course as one way to complement and extend current approaches to ageing. Whilst more-than-representational theories have been critiqued for being a-temporal, the empirics shared in this paper demonstrate how the approach is important in foregrounding the temporal relations through which the life-course mediates the everyday (Jones, 2011). Following an overview of the methodology in section four, I demonstrate the value of bringing together more-than-representational theories and the life-course by sharing accounts of areas of significance to older people in Manchester, UK. Complemented with participant photographs, this section disrupts reductive narratives of older age by highlighting how more-than-representational dynamics from throughout individual life-courses entwine with senses of place. There is a need to more thoroughly explore the overlaps between more-than-representational theories and the life-course to further develop relational geographies of ageing.

Enlivening the geographies of ageing
There is an established and growing geographical literature on older age, with particular interest from scholars working on geographies of health and care over the past decade (Harper & Laws, 1995;Schwanen et al., 2012;Skinner et al., 2015). The 1990s cultural turn sparked a shift away from medical understandings of the body and Cartesian interpretations of space and initiated an interest in relational and sociological models of health, care and the life-course (Andrews, 2017;Hopkins & Pain, 2007;Vanderbeck, 2007). Prompting a body of work that was concerned with understanding the lived experiences of older people, this literature observes, amongst other things, the interrelatedness of place and the hidden, multisensory and emotional geographies that are entangled with different environments and practices (Skinner et al., 2015, p. 787).
Relational thinking in Geography is nothing new (Jones, 2009). Arising out of the critique of Euclidean geographies in the 1990s, a relational ontology diverges from understandings of space, time and scale as static containers of activity, toward an openended interpretation characterised by interconnectedness and process. Although there are numerous strands of relational thinking within Human Geography, thinking relationally always involves a recognition that places only emerge through their connections with other places in many ways at many scales (Marston, 2000). As Darling (2009), building on the work of Massey (2005) suggests, 'place comes to be identified through the ways it brings together, and relates to, a series of other spaces and relations ' (p. 1940). Notably, it also emphasises temporality, whereby space and time are entangled and forever coming into being.
Exploring the relations amidst older people and the places they inhabit has long been of interest to geographies of ageing scholars. Such studies have shown how older people psychologically associate with different places through memory, sensory and affective familiarity, either while resident in one place (Rowles, 1986) or when moving between places (Dyck, Kontos, Angus, & McKeever, 2005;Maclaren, 2018). Similarly, a growing body of work focuses on the perceived loss of place and community felt in older age as neighbourhoods and cities change. These studies have highlighted how older people negotiate and adapt their routines and rhythms to maintain a sense of attachment to place and have demonstrated the importance of reoccurring encounters, familiarity and slowness in inducing a sense of belonging and continuity McHugh, 2007;Ziegler, 2012).
In geographies of ageing, relational approaches have emerged most prominently, however, in debates on 'age-relationality' (Hopkins & Pain, 2007;Tarrant, 2016). Indeed, Hopkins & Pain's (2007) now seminal work proposes three concepts as the means through which to develop a 'relational geographies of age': intergenerationality, intersectionality and lifecourse. A focus on intergeneratonality, they suggest, can foreground how identities are continually produced through interactions between different generational groups. Moreover, intersectionality encourages a consideration for how different markers of identity (gender, sexuality and so on) intersect, prompting the question 'who else' older (and younger) people are, and how these arise in particular contexts. Finally, the life-course approach recognises that individuals live dynamic lives with different and contingent meanings. Hopkins and Pain's (2007) work has inspired new lines of thought in geographies of ageing literature (Andrews et al., 2009;Bailey, 2009;Worth, 2009;Ziegler, 2012). Indeed, Horton and Kraftl (2008) critiqued Hopkins and Pain (2007) on numerous grounds. Most significant to this paper, Horton and Kraftl (2008) argue that drawing lines between generations, identities and over life-courses risks defining the affective and emotional heart of everyday lives. Citing more-than-representational theories, Horton and Kraftl (2008) argue that this rigidity undermines the messiness of the world and turns away from the lively complexities of how age categories continually emerge through, and within, the everyday. Despite this relational reinvigoration of geographies of ageing, relational thinking remains marginal in the study of older age and several oversights have been observed (Schwanen et al., 2012;Skinner et al., 2015). It is to two of these interrelated oversights that this paper responds.
Firstly, the temporal and varied ways in which the past influences the present and the future in the lives of older people have not been explicitly foregrounded 3 (Schwanen et al., 2012). Secondly, and closely related, research has tended to merely point out the existence of relations rather than unpicking the intricacy and specificity of relations (Skinner et al., 2015). Existing research with older people focuses on researching the relations between ages and generations. This is problematic because it has failed to recognise how multiple, multiscalar places and times are responsible for age relations (Hopkins & Pain, 2007;Horton & Kraftl, 2008). Indeed, Skinner et al. (2015) suggest that 'future work on ageing needs to attend to the intricacy of individual relations' (p. 788). That is, rather than simply pointing out the existence of relations between things, research needs to 'describe richly' the ongoing, and, as this paper argues, the contingent, performative and temporally complex nature of these relations and their consequences on experiences of place from across the life-course. 4 Scholars have suggested that incorporating relational and more-than-representational perspectives into work on geographies of ageing can remedy these oversights (cf Andrews, 2017;McHugh, 2009;Skinner et al., 2015). It is to this need that this paper responds and develops.

Entwining the life-course and more-than-representational theories
The life-course perspective refers to a growing multidisciplinary paradigm for the study of people's lives, structural contexts and social change within the social sciences (Elchardus & Smits, 2006). The life-course replaced the life-cycle as a lens of analysis in the 1960s, prompted by the accelerated social change instigated by economic globalization 5 (Heinz & Krüger, 2001). These changes meant that standardised age 'categories', previously used to mark phases of the life cycle such as childhood, adulthood and older age, became understood as messy and individualized (Featherstone & Hepworth, 1989;Smart, 2007). Furthermore, the timing of important life transitions became less rigid and more fluid. An important dimension of the life-course approach is its consideration of the entire life rather than focusing on isolated events or predefined demographic groups. In doing so, attention is directed toward the interplay between individual lives and the historical, social, cultural, political and economic factors in the process of ageing.
The life-course approach has begun to gain traction in social and cultural geography, where there has been a growing engagement with concepts that transcend and entwine people and place to inform understandings of people's worlds across time (Bailey, 2009;Hopkins & Pain, 2007;Wimark, Lewis, & Caretta, 2017). For Schwanen et al. (2012), 'the challenge for geographers considering ageing through a life-course lens is to keep continuity and discontinuity in dialectical tension' (p. 1294). To do this, Schwanen et al. (2012) advocate thinking about the life-course as 'folds' (p. 1294). It is through the re-folding of other life-courses, of the human and non-human, of discourses, and of the material and immaterial, that age and place can be understood as 'entwined becomings'. As a result, linear trajectories of the life-course give way to more complex, topological understandings. Kathrin Hörschelmann (2011), however, observes that research using 'transition' and 'life-course' frameworks often privilege continuity over delays, precarity and backtrack.
The life-course by its very name suggests a linear and neat narrative, with predictable and chronological movement through youth, adulthood to older age. To complicate this chronology Hörschelmann (2011) makes the case for a greater focus on life transitions in geographical and social research on the life-course. Hörschelmann (2011) suggests that transition needs to be reconceptualised to better capture the non-linearity and diversity of life and the relation between social and personal time-spaces. Although relational approaches to life-course transitions have gone some way in complicating the linearity observed by Hörschelmann, the transitions discussed tend to be 'significant', such as becoming a parent or going to University (Hopkins, 2006;Valentine, 2003;Worth, 2009). Focusing on key life events, I argue, comes at the expense of the subtle and dynamic ways in which the life-course mediates everyday life. Indeed, there is a need for a geographical perspective to excavate the 'pathways and experiences over the lifecourse' and to examine the relation of different experiences across it (Hopkins & Pain, 2007, p. 290). The life-course is not simply an abstract theoretical concept. Individuals holdand often shareunderstandings of how their lives 'should' unfold with age. Consider, for instance, how expectations coalesce around certain chronological ages: owning a car or a house, getting married, having children, down-sizing and retiring. Indeed, such life 'stages' are often understood in-relation with one another. As such, there are social and cultural ideas and expectations surrounding the life-course which mediate the lived experiences of individuals in various ways.
More-than-representational theories are part of a body of work that can be contextualised within a wider turn to practice and performativity in the humanities and social sciences (Colls, 2012). More-than-representational theories are not coherent, or easily definable in nature. Rather than providing a definition of what constitutes the approach, I prefer to consider more-than-representational theories as a series of tactical 'suggestions', or 'supplements' (Colls, 2012;Dewsbury, Harrison, Rose, & Wylie, 2002). The ethos of which is to evade the 'deadening effect' of Cartesian analysis of identity and meaning as is evident in more traditional ways of conceiving age and place in geographies of ageing literature (Lorimer, 2005, p. 83). By enlivening and revealing excessive, transient and more-than-human potentialities, more-than-representational theories emphasise how, epistemologically, spaces, times and subjectivities emerge through dynamic, embodied and relational practices (Macpherson, 2010;Simpson, 2017). They contest the efficacy of representational understandings of the world, whose ontology is rooted in the idea that there is something total, certain and real and instead advocate an 'energetic ontology' based on a commitment to 'potential, movement and vibrant becoming' (Thrift, 1996, p. 31). Importantly, more-than-representational theories do not ignore representations, rather they focus on what representations do, their force or what Anderson (2018) terms, 'representations-in-relation' (p. 1), and how they make a difference in specific geo-historical contexts and emergent life-courses.
In foregrounding process and immanence, more-than-representational theories complicate any clear sense of chronological time, instead focusing on how different elements of an individual's life come to the fore both expectedly (such as deliberately walking past the school your child attended to reminisce about parenthood) and unexpectedly (such as experiencing an on-rush of memories from teenage years through a fleeting smell or glance). Whilst more-than-representational theories have been critiqued for being a-temporal, the empirics shared in this paper demonstrate how the approach is important in foregrounding the temporal relations through which the life-course mediates the everyday (Jones, 2011).
In doing so, more-than-representational theories open-up the complexities of the present by thinking through the different forces (personal, social, political, cultural and so on) that shape and mediate it (Anderson, 2014(Anderson, , 2018Colls, 2012). In the empirical portion of this paper, I draw upon the understandings of 'force' and 'forces of existing' advanced by Colls (2012) and Anderson (2014Anderson ( , 2018 to consider how previous life experiences and broader forces mediate a body's capacities to affect and be affected in the present. Thinking through forces injects a sense of dynamism into linear conceptualisations of the life-course by attuning to how a body's capacitiesto think, feel, do, and so onare reconstituted through relations which extend beyond an encounter, folding into other times and places. 6 Moreover, and relatedly, thinking through these more-than-representational forces attune to how the stories encounteredwhen researching withentwine in multiple temporalities from individual life-courses which are not discrete or easily separated, but which create an interrelated and processual dialogue (Bonnett & Alexander, 2013). Such an entwinement provides the vernacular to consider individual life-courses in a more nuanced way, to disrupt homogenising understandings of older age, and to begin to unpick the temporalities that are (re)made and folded within the everyday. It is attuning to the more-than-representational dynamics of the life-course with which this paper is primarily concerned. I now turn to the methodological approach that is provoked by such a unity before grounding this theoretical proposal in practice by sharing accounts of areas of significance developed with older people.

Researching with
The empirics shared in this paper are from a project which aimed to understand how older people relate with place. Participants were invited to share areas of significance with me through photo-walks. 7 The intention of the photo-walks was to illuminate the often-fleeting factors that bind or buckle people's sense of place. Participants were given as much free reign as possible to decide where they would like to walk. It was only through ongoing reflection as the research unfolded that I came to realise how significant the life-course was in mediating older people's experiences of everyday life.
The accounts shared were developed with older people between 2014 and 2016 in the suburb of Chorlton and the City Centre of Manchester, UK. Chorlton is located approximately four miles southwest of Manchester City Centre and, over the past 80 years or so, has transformed from a small agricultural village to a gentrified and increasingly aspirational suburb. Chorlton hosts several community groups for older residents from which participants volunteered to take part in this project. Of the 13 respondents, 9 were White-British females and the rest were White-British males. Ages ranged from 53 to 91 and all participants had lived in Chorlton for at least 6 years, some for their entire lives, with others returning at various life-stages. 8 Talking whilst walking foregrounded subtleties and discontinuities as participants responded differently to the unfolding landscape that we happened into (Pyyry, 2016;Ramsden, 2017). Participants were asked to photograph anything that they deemed to be significant to them as we were walking. This could range from the mundanity of litter on the street to renowned buildings, and everything between. Participants were advised that the quality of the photographs did not matter and to use the camera as a device with which to reflect on the landscape. The act of taking photographs allowed participants to reflect on how things and people entwine with their own life-courses whilst creating a common reference point between myself and participants. The mobile element facilitated an engagement with those fleeting provocations that often escape recount whilst thinking in-relation helped to avoid the 'slippage into individualism' that more biographical approaches 9 have been charged with (Hörschelmann, 2011, p. 380).
Rather than a prescriptive approach, which would revolve around a set of predefined questions and methods, places of significance were encountered through and with older people by 'following' their relations and discussing the places we happened into. Manchester City Centre was brought into the project as participants considered it an important part of their everyday lives. Despite wider trends in Human Geography concerned with co-production and participation, research has often been conducted on older participants rather than with them (Kindon, Pain & Kesby, 2007). In the geographies of ageing field, older people are often 'researched' through observation, semi-structured interviews and photo-elicitation techniques whereby the researcher aims to gather information 'about older people' (Dyck et al., 2005;Lager et al., 2016). This researching on approach is problematic because the 'researcher' tends to be pre-occupied with the object of study (older people) instead of critically reflecting on how that 'object' is forever constituted in-relation with the research context. Working with, on the other hand, avoids stereotyping older people on the grounds of 'age' because it better understands older people as relational beings who are responsive to the relations they happen into (Richardson, 2015a(Richardson, , 2015bTarrant, 2014Tarrant, , 2016.
Given that this paper is attentive to the 'intricacy and specificity of relations', it would be an oversight to ignore the role of the researcher in mediating the stories which were shared (Skinner et al., 2015). Moreover, what researchers are doing to knowledge is a key concern of more-than-representational research (Vannini, 2015). It has become a truism to say that all research is mediated. A more nuanced approach is needed which asks in what ways the positionality of the researcher affects the stories shared. I found that paying attention to the shifting relations between myself and participants foregrounded how the identities and stories shared were moulded and performed in-relation with what the participants expected a young female researcher might want or 'expect' to hear from an 'older person' (Pink, 2008;Wimark et al., 2017). This more nuanced approach is evident in the work of Tarrant (2014Tarrant ( , 2016 and Richardson (2015aRichardson ( , 2015b who highlight how identitiesboth their own and participantsare negotiated, intersectional and ever-emergent. Due to word limitations, I can only give an indicative set of reflections on the effect of my positionality in the analysis. Moreover, although there are methodological contributions made in this research, they are not developed here. Each photo-walk was transcribed verbatim. All transcripts were observed collectively, and an open-coding frame was adopted highlighting recurrent themes and points of interest. This allowed the identification of variances while maintaining a relational perspective. For example, the themes extended beyond the paths taken, interweaving personal accounts with collective memories and histories. Each participant was given a pseudonym for confidentiality. Photographs were not analysed as static representations, rather, they were viewed in conjunction with the photo-walks and ongoing conversation with others. This was to tease out nuances between individual accounts and to illuminate the relational-temporal complexity behind the seemingly holistic representational form. The photographs that feature in the empirical section were chosen to complement the stories participants shared. 10 In the empirical section of this paper, I firstly detail how participants enter any encounter with particular 'forces of existing'. Shaped by their unique life experiences, these 'forces of existing' mediate different capacities to affect and be affected (Anderson, 2014, P. 160). Secondly, I show how past, present and future temporalities are in an ongoing dialogue, ever-reconfigured by the potentialities flowing in the present (Jones, 2011). I highlight how moments of individual life-courses are brought to the fore and interwoven with narratives of place to preserve a continuity of identity in older age. Thirdly, I explain how the fleeting factors encountered during the photo-walk have the potential to re-configure, disrupt and solidify pre-supposed narratives about older age, the life-course and place as participants engage in processual world-making.
Forces of existing and the mediation of the moment As Louise and I meandered along the winding streets of Chorltonvillea 1911 garden village within Chorltonbeech and horse-chestnut trees towered above us and wideopen streets lined with grass verges and neat gardens invited us in. Louise, a 69-year-old who has lived in Chorlton for 45 years since being a student explained, 'I'm going to take you around the Ville. It's a place I've used throughout my life, when taking the children to school, volunteering as a teacher and walking the dog. Now, I use it like a botanical garden, to keep fit and as a morale booster'. Entwining her life-long interest in horticulture and the outdoors with the Ville, Louise explained how 'plants have always been my hobby. I used to garden a lot, but I was very poorly a few years ago and so I can't do it much myself now. I like to do this walk because I can appreciate other people's'.
Like every individual, Louise entered this research encounter with a particular 'force of existing' (Anderson, 2014, p. 160). Constituted and shaped by individual experiences from across different life-courses, these forces of existing emerge and are reconstituted in-relation with the comings and goings of everyday encounters as different capacities are realised and just as quickly dissipate (Anderson, 2014). These forces, however, are not entirely individual. Like the life-course, forces of existing are reformed in dynamic relation with other forces in the on-flow of life and shaped the individual stories that were shared in this research. For Louise, it was being a mother, enjoying greenspace, moving to Chorlton from Holmfirth, Yorkshire and using the Ville for therapeutic enjoyment that punctuated her narrative.
Whilst walking, Louise explained how she spends more time in the local area as her physical capability has lessened with age (Rowles, 1986). Although the space Louise traverses has lessened in a Cartesian sense, the space is nevertheless enlivened by a relational-temporal dialogue with other times and places within her life-course (Bonnett & Alexander, 2013). Attuning to the often-overlooked ways in which the lifecourse animates the present can complicate assumptions about how older people experience place. Rather than older age equating to a 'shrinking world', a more-thanrepresentational approach which is attuned to the nuances of individual life-courses foregrounds the imaginative potentialities through which place is enlivened, experienced and traversed (Rowles, 1986;Schwanen et al., 2012).
Attuning to these forces of existing, and the unexpected ways in which individual lifecourses mediate the present foregrounded some of the similarities and differences between participants. Most participants, for instance, associated Barlow Moor Roadan arterial route between neighbouring Stretford and Didsburywith negative, 'exclusionary' change. Once full of 'practical, everyday shops', almost all participants recounted with dismay that there is an abundance of 'Estate Agents' and 'trendy bars for young expats' in whose image most participants felt Chorlton was being remade (Ziegler, 2012). Indeed, participants often drew on generational similarities and differences between the 'young' and 'old' when recounting how Chorlton had changed (Richardson, 2015b). Arthur, on the other hand, a 58-year-old self-identified 'old Chorltonian' who owns a significant amount of property in Chorlton, found Barlow Moor Road comforting precisely because of the Estate Agents. Arthur's 'Grandad built Chorlton Ville in 1910/11ʹ, and so he enjoyed the 'connections to family heritage'. Although Arthur now lives in the Lake District, he feels a deep attachment to Chorlton and, as a form of productive and mobile nostalgia, visits four days a week to volunteer at community groups for older people (Bonnett & Alexander, 2013;Wheeler, 2017). In this regard, Arthur maintains a continuity with former points in his life-course in forging a future that includes both Chorlton and the Lake District.
This example highlights how attuning to the ways in which individual life-courses are entwined with place can foreground different capacities to affect and be affected. Moreover, the reference to 'young expats' reinforces the observation that generational discourses matter ('intergenerationality') in the processual constitution of identity (Hopkins & Pain, 2007;Richardson, 2015b). Horton and Kraftl (2008), however, caution that drawing such lines between generations may obscure broader factors which exceed generational distinctions, such as morality. I would also suggest thatas this example showsthere are also a multitude of minor, more-than-representational dynamics which influence identity formation.
The accounts shared were also imbricated in current life-situations and ideas about the future. Most participants no longer felt they had a place in the redeveloped Piccadilly Gardens area of Manchester City Centre which, as Fiona described, was once a 'beautiful sunken garden with flowerbeds'. Sophie, a recently widowed 83-year-old, in contrast, was particularly fond of this area. Taking a photograph of the goings-on, Sophie explained how she likes to see 'the life around [. . .] there's all sorts of weird and wonderful things' (Figure 1). Sitting on a low, wood and metal bench, Sophie began to converse with her own stream of consciousness and the relations she happened into, 'look at those girls over there, they've almost got their backsides out those skirts are so short! Mind you, I don't blame them, if I was their age, I would! (laughs)'. Sophie and I watched diversity unfold in front of us, from street performers to workers to homelessness and the cultural diversity therein. It is in part the incoherency of the gardens that Sophie liked where the 'combination of foci' engendered a feeling of 'being alive' (Rishbeth & Rogaly, 2017).
Sophie went onto explain how, having recently lost her husband, she felt 'utterly lost' and that 'this is [her] time now'. For Sophie, the chance to take part in this project presented an impetus to reflect on her life and the 'confidence to get out, to do things' where she had not before. Emotions about the passing of her partner and her current life-situation were reawakened by momentary intensities and flows of feeling which resonated with Sophie in that moment, creating temporary belonging as the relations we happened into reconfigured her past, present and future (McHugh, 2009). Sophie turned to face me and, with a sincerity to her voice, said 'I've gone from caring for my Husband, to caring for a friend. I need to get out and do things'. Key turning points in people's lives, such as the death of a loved one, can often rapidly and abruptly alter people's perception of time and their future intentions. The future has only recently been acknowledged in life-course approaches (Hopkins, 2006;Worth, 2009), and is vital to consider as future intentions necessarily guide experiences and expectations of the present.
Sophie's perceptions of age and time were partly mediated by the intergenerational relations we happened into in Piccadilly Gardens. In contrast to Lager et al.'s (2016) study which emphasised how the clashing rhythms of older and younger generations evoked a sense of 'otherness', Sophie's example demonstrates how, sometimes, the momentary recognition of difference can be the impetus for change, a spark for renewed life and a time of reflection. As Hopkins and Pain (2007) suggest, understanding older and younger people as sharing the same social and political relations can take the focus away from 'older age' as a category and move toward understanding how identities are formed in-relation. Hörschelmann's (2011) proposal to focus on the rupture and discontinuity of lifecourse transitions is directly applicable in this caseevents such as the death of a partner, relative or friend have profound effects on the life-course. Sophie's example, however, demonstrates how such transitions are never left in the past and that they can re-emerge unexpectedly, encouraged by the relations happened into. There are, then, multiple often-overlapping temporalities influencing how Sophie conceived of her life in that moment, from the passing of her partner, to caring for her friend, to comprehensions of her own future and the relations happened into. Indeed, would Sophie have shared any of these thoughts had we not sat on that bench in Piccadilly when we did?
Foregrounding these often-hidden dialogues provides a way to disrupt the idea of the present as a pure and unmediated event. Highlighting the different ways in which change and the passing of time are understood and folded into individual life-courses provides a way of complicating what it means to be an older person (Schwanen et al., 2012). Moving beyond understandings of the older individual as an already constituted subject, I have demonstrated how participants experiences of everyday life are mediated by their geo-historically situated life-courses as well as the forces they both enter and leave behind.

Performative pasts
It is well documented in geographical literature on ageing that, as people grow older, their relationships with places alter and that this can result in individuals struggling to find places which support the continuity of their identities Ziegler, 2012). Participants searched for stability and coherency, in a past seemingly removed from, what Bill termed, the 'turbulence of the present'. Each referenced historical sites and narratives that were central to the collective psychological map of older Chorltonians and Mancunians: 'the Bee Gee's house at 51 Kepple Road' and the 'industry worker bees branded on bollards and street furniture' around Manchester City Centre. This was most apparent in the (re)telling of shared tales and recollections where participants adopted the role of a nostalgic historical tour guide. For instance, following my interest in the history of the Market Gardens that once surrounded Beech Road, the traditional centre of Chorlton, Bill offered a history book and several leaflets whilst Fiona shared a postcard with illustrations of her favourite buildings in Manchester.
In recounting these narratives, it felt as though the participants were performing 'emotional maintenance' of Chorlton as somewhere cherished (Bonnett & Alexander, 2013, p. 396). Indeed, equipped with his book on the history of Chorlton, 53-year-old Bill appeared to take great pleasure in 'teach [ing] me' about the history of the Market Gardens, something he thought I was 'too young to know'. Significantly, the Market Gardens were not present in Bill's lifetime either, yet he still felt they were significant enough for him to share. I got the sense that, because the Market Gardens were temporally closer to Bill's lifetime and experiences than they were to my own, a sense of pride was fostered through recounting community history to an 'outsider' from a different space and time: me.
Bill highlights the performative handling of temporality in intergenerational narratives and demonstrates the importance of recognising the effect of relational identity when researching-with (Richardson, 2015b). Moreover, individuals entwine fragments of disparate stories, histories and memories that were not of their direct experience, but nonetheless gave meaning to their life-course narrative. These can be momentarily picked up, enrolled and dropped, mediated by the contexts individuals find themselves in. For instance, Bill was talking to a younger researcher who 'didn't know much about the area', so incorporating the Market Gardens into his life-course narrative seemed appropriate in that moment (Tarrant, 2016). Understanding that identity and place are simultaneously expressed and constituted on a momentary basisas more-thanrepresentational theories advocateprovides a more nuanced understanding of the lifecourse as both processual and temporal (Schwanen et al., 2012).
These collective reminiscences, along with the material presences that often instigated them, were utilised as what Bill termed as historical 'anchor points', momentarily tying the individual and their life-course to a collective sense of place. In linking Chorlton and Manchester to broader narratives, participants told well-worn stories about an unspecified past, drawing upon commonly held narratives. References to 'the old days' were frequent, with Arthur and Fiona recounting how 'everyone knew each other'. When recounting the past there is a tendency to repeat stories through a rose-tinted lens (Wheeler, 2017). As such, despite the repetition of shared and individual historical narratives, recounting nonetheless remains an 'event' in its own right, as individuals reimagine their life-course in the present. From a morethan-representational perspective, the logic of the unfolding 'event' means that any representation is always volatile (Anderson & Harrison, 2010;McHugh, 2009).
There are certain stories, feelings and emotions that older people identifying as white, middle-class and British might feel as though they are expected to recount, avoid, or to hope for. These stories are a function of commonly held discourses of the present as much as they are collective reflections on 'the' past. Acknowledging cultural specificities to representations of older age and other social categories draws attention to the ways in which older age is experienced and how representations of older age circulate and become embodied. In this sense, older age becomes a performance of 'an' identity which both remakes and reproduces social and cultural worlds. More-than-representational theories' emphasis on the performative effect of such representations provides a means to consider the lively, relational-temporal nuances which mediate how 'older age' and participants understandings of their own lifecourses are constituted in any given moment (Horton & Kraftl, 2008).
Many participants drew focus to the seemingly banal. For instance, participants understood the 'the fashion trends of younger people' and the 'change in signage on shop fronts' as glimpses of a public culture shifting over time. For Bill, and other participants, the looming European Union (EU) referendum mediated large amounts of conversation. The entwinement of the referendum with encountering snippets of foreign languages and witnessing the bright colours branding international restaurants whilst walking triggered thoughts on the rapidity of 'alienating' change. Indeed, Bill photographed Beech Road as an area which has been meaningful throughout his life, but which has changed significantly ( Figure 2). Commenting on these changes signifies a collective set of anxieties that would have been less prevalent had this research been before the referendum.
Bill and Ken have found the 'opening of fancy foreign restaurants' and the shutting down of pubs where they used to socialise detrimental to their current social networks and senses of place. The often-overlooked, creeping changes to the physical and social fabric of Chorlton confronted the senses of self and identity that Bill and Ken have forged in Chorlton. Commenting on such negative changes could be understood as a partially expected discourse of an older person. Indeed, these narratives position Bill and Ken as blameless victims of the change around them, rather than as partly responsible for how they themselves might have played a role in the changes that have happened. Indeed, if I had asked Bill and Ken whether they still frequent the pubs, they may well have said they have not done so in many years, which may have made them conscious of their own role in the changes that have happened. It is through being more critical of what participants share that researchers can find out about the many idiosyncrasies that people and their actions comprise. It is important therefore to consider how researchers relate with and represent the older people with whom we engage. Paradoxically, the performance and repetition of these narratives of perceived negative change helped Bill and Ken maintain their own sense of continuity and attachment in the present through reaffirming their entwinement with Chorlton's 'past'. In this way, life-courses are uniquely individual yet collectively sustained (Schwanen et al., 2012).
Participants interspersed these collective stories with their own individual life-courses. On photo-walks, participants were particularly fond of visiting and (re)tracing tracks, shops and spaces which have been meaningful throughout their life-courses. Whilst journeying past Chorlton Library, Fiona fondly recounted the history of the building, noting that it was a Carnegie library and explained how the original building-plans were onboard the Titanic. By binding Chorlton into this globally collective memory, Fiona positioned Chorlton in the world, and vice versa. As Fiona explained, she did not plan to share this story. Rather, it came to her as she began to think about why the library was so significant to her. Fiona explained 'when I was a child, my Dad passed away [. . .] and there wasn't any help, so the library became my sanctuary'. In this way, Fiona's memories of her past shape the way she uses and understands Chorlton today (Bonnett & Alexander, 2013). Whilst walking, participants are moving across a multiplicity of times and spaces which 'collide and merge' from throughout their lives (Crang & Travlou, 2001, p. 163). Paying attention to the unique ways in which these more-than-representational temporalities interact with individual life-courses and collective forces foregrounds how identities are ever reconfigured and reframed by new, lively relations (Horton & Kraftl, 2008;Jones, 2011).
Although this paper emphasises the need to consider discontinuities and disruption in people's lives and to avoid the homogenisation of 'older people', it is also apparent that older people themselves seek continuity in meaning in their narratives. Whilst researchers may seek to explore the often-overlooked complexities of experience, the narratives shared were often constructed around collective historic tales or traditional phases of the life-cycle to simplify a life and make it comprehensible. The more-thanrepresentational approach advanced in this paper contributes a means to foreground the ways in which these narratives can be unsettled by the 'on-flow' of life (Anderson & Harrison, 2010). Indeed, more-than-representational theories aim to 'inject a sense of wonder into the world' by highlighting the precarious, unfolding nature of the everyday (Vannini, 2015, p. 5). It is to avoiding and encountering fleeting remembering that I now turn.

Avoiding and encountering fleeting remembering
In selecting areas of significance, participants could, to a certain extent, define their experience of the present. However, the fleeting factors encountered during a photowalk have the potential to disrupt this presupposed narrative. This was particularly apparent for Fiona and her feelings toward Oswald Road School. As we wandered the central area of Chorlton, the school was to some extent unavoidable. Fiona, noticeably flustered, explained that her sons had attended the school and that passing it brings in to focus how she no longer walks them to school or even lives in the same city as them. She now tries to avoid the area due to being overwhelmed with 'empty nest syndrome'. Fiona subsequently led us to the library, keen to enter new relations that would comfort and not confront.
As Jones remarks, connections with elsewhere and else-when from the life-course are 'like embers enveloped into space that, when disturbed or framed by a new relational configuration, can burst back into renewed life ' (2011, p. 1). As Fiona's sudden onrush of empty nest syndrome demonstrates, the life-course is not necessarily something that is predictable, chronological and ordered. Nor is the life-course something which is entirely fleeting, emergent and disordered. Rather, it lies somewhere in-between and one must pay attention to the more-than-representational, contextual particularities that mediate how stories are shared to comprehend the nuanced dynamics of the life-course.
In order 'to maintain one's sea legs', people search for the 'sensory hooks' of their own belonging in a present constituted through temporal relations with elsewhere and else-when (Berlant, 2011, p. 4). This is precisely what happened when visiting the library with Fiona, a place she photographed as an area of significance from throughout her life ( Figure 3). Time was spent delving into the library archives and photographs with a librarian who became enrolled in Fiona's drive to re-kindle and share her memories and experiences. Thumbing through a selection of black and white albums, Fiona selected a photograph, held it with both hands, ran her thumb slowly across the image and smiled contently. Fiona pointed at 'the different markings on the roof", explaining that 'these were the dividers of the different rooms in the library: a children's room, an adults room [. . .] and, you know, it really felt like a venue for learning'. For Fiona, the old photographs encountered were 'havens of stasis', 'freezeframes' which facilitated the recounting of norms and values of times gone by and in which times from her youth were preserved (McHugh, 2007). Indeed, in the UK, older people are commonly understood as livingeven dwellingin a nostalgic past (Bonnett & Alexander, 2013). Although Fiona's story is inevitably mediated by past associations, this past is not static and contained, but is mobile and generative, mediating her engagement with the library in the present. Fiona recounted, in detail, the sensory qualities of the environment explaining how 'they used to spray the books with some powder [. . .] I remember them having a very distinctive smell'. This 'imminent world making' implicated in a performance of the past created a deep, nostalgic sense of belonging and a re-living of a time gone-by (Berlant, 2011, p. 50).
It is well documented in geographic literature that sensory relations can facilitate a therapeutic engagement with place, 'serving as provocations or aide memoires' (Gorman, 2017, p. 22). This was particularly apparent for Louise where 'the smell of cut grass' and the aural quality of the 'babbling Chorlton brook' embodied her meaning of home. The home Louise referred to was not Chorlton, but her childhood home of Holmfirth, Yorkshire. This sensory familiarity stumbled upon created a temporary sense of identity and attachment. Similarly, street buskers were frequently commented upon, with participants often visiting the city centre when buskers were playing. 'The Hoochie Coochie Man', a street touting busker who plays music resonant of their histories was particularly popular. Jane explained how 'he makes all the children start dancing, it's a lovely atmosphere'.
On hearing the 'Hoochie Coochie Man', participants relived the intensities of a different time and space in the present. This music interrupted one set of relations and put them 'into contact with [their] affective past, transforming [their] subjectivi [ties] and experiences in the present in dynamic relation' (Anderson, 2014, p. 98;Hill, 2015). Hearing this music provided a thread of continuity between youth and older age. Memory is not just part of a 'youth' that has stopped but can be reactivated by chance encounters. Moreover, although the morethan-representational, sensory elements encountered are anchored in the 'now', the reasons they are deemed to be significant are because they fold in multiple temporalities which are particular to individual life-courses.
Memories were provoked by a fleeting action of the researcher, by a glance or momentary eye contact with a passer-by, a scent or a habit. As Ken and I journeyed down Barlow Moor Road, I reached in to my pocket for a sweet, prompting Ken to recount how 'there used to be an old sweet shop there, and when we had open back buses, I went in and nicked a bag of sweets then ran and jumped on the back of the bus, it was so funny!'. Ken, a 55-year -old who has lived in Chorlton for 29 years photographs old buildings to share with friends at community groups. Despite the perceived negative changes Ken had commented on, this memory instigated laughter and happiness which countered Ken's frustration. Memories are not in the past, but are forever remembered with the capacity to give places new meaning (Eck & Pijpers, 2017). This memory was not only contingent upon the individual's life-course, but also on the fleeting subtleties in the everyday: if the sweet had not been produced, this memory may not have been shared.
The potentialities of the ordinary are also beckoned by 'praesentia' (Hetherington, 2003(Hetherington, , p. 1941. For almost all participants, the absence of friends and family who once walked the streets of Chorlton and Manchester affected their sense of place. For Hetherington (2003), praesentia 'involves a presence of something absentsomething that we cannot behold but which touches us and which we can touch' (Hetherington, 2003(Hetherington, , p. 1939. For instance, Polly explained 'that shop there was Burt's, it was a really high-class gentleman's outfitter and my brotherwho is now 77was taken here by my Grandma [. . .] for his first long trousers'. As such, fleeting provocations have the capacity to animate a person's former social presence. In this sense, the city and the places within it do not exist in an individual's mind, or in the objective physical landscape, but in the dynamic relation between subject and world, the discursive and the lived.

Endings and beginnings in-relation
This paper has proposed and demonstrated why bringing together work on the lifecourse and more-than-representational theories might be a fruitful avenue through which to extend and complement current approaches to ageing research. Understanding the life-course through more-than-representational theories complicates any clear sense of chronological time, illuminating the often-overlooked ways in which the life-course mediates the present in unexpected and expected ways. Furthermore, more-than-representational theories foreground process, change and the constant reshuffling of relations that the life-course comprises. This framing not only disrupts reductive narratives of older age, but also shows how more-than-representational theories are important to thinking about temporality (Jones, 2011). In bringing these approaches together, I invite a more nuanced understanding into the relational temporalities of the life-course than has been done thus far and broaden interdisciplinary debates concerning ageing, relationality and the life-course (Hopkins & Pain, 2007;Horton & Kraftl, 2008;Skinner et al., 2015).
Although Geographers have begun to observe the dynamics of the life-course, it has been argued that the life-course approach tends to prioritise order over delay and discontinuity (Hörschelmann, 2011). Moreover, whilst geographic work on life-course transitions has illuminated the often-complicated ways in which transitions can unfold, this work tends to prioritise key life events. This comes at the expense of the multitude of often-overlooked, more-thanrepresentational ways in which the life-course mediates everyday life (Hopkins, 2006;Valentine, 2003). Further, Skinner et al. (2015) have noted that geographical research on ageing needs to 'describe richly' the complex and temporal nature of relations, and their consequences of experiences of place from across the life-course. Scholars have suggested that incorporating relational and more-than-representational perspectives might help respond to this need and strengthen research on ageing (Andrews et al., 2009;Skinner et al., 2015).
In responding to this need, I have demonstrated two interrelated ways in which uniting the life-course and more-than-representational approaches can advance research on ageing. Firstly, a more-than-representational approach to the life-course injects an appreciation for the processual and relational temporalities which are currently missing in research on ageing. It does this by foregrounding the temporal folds through which the past and future inhere in the present (Skinner et al., 2015). The theoretical framework advanced in this paper recognises how 'phases' or 'transitions' in the life-course can morph and merge into each other and that this is provoked by factors flowing in the present. For Sophie, it was spending time in Piccadilly Gardens which triggered an on-rush of memories surrounding the passing of her Husband and a reconfiguration of her future. A more-than-representational reading of the life-course moves age beyond a static, biological 'thing', toward a performance of 'an' identity which reproduces and remakes social and cultural worlds (Anderson, 2018;Pain, 2001).
Secondly, and related, this foregrounding of how experiences in the present enfold individual and collective pasts and futures provides a means to illuminate how different individuals have varying capacities to affect and be affected (Anderson & Harrison, 2010;Bonnett & Alexander, 2013). Attuning to how an individual's force of existing is mediated through affect charged encounters with other times and places has highlighted that there is no single way of being an older person. Whilst 'age' as a representation matters, attuning to the immediacy of life highlights how it is always exceeded by life itself (Horton & Kraftl, 2008, p. 286). This way of thinking is applicable to any social category and responds to inter-disciplinary critiques concerned with essentialising people based on biological age (Pain, 2001).
The bringing together of more-than-representational theories and the life-course advances understandings of age as a relational entity by providing a framework which recognises 'older people' as the temporary alignment of a range of social, cultural, political (and so on) forces (Colls, 2012). To put another way, it attends to the variety of ways in which the often-overlooked backgrounds, relational discourses and affects mediate how interaction unfolds and facilitates a more nuanced understanding into how non-linearity in the life-course quite literally 'happens'.
I have shown how the flexible use of photo-walks facilitated a thinking with participants and a focus on the relational doing of fieldwork (Richardson, 2015a(Richardson, , 2015bTarrant, 2014). Paying attention to the shifting relations between participants and myself foregrounded how the identities and stories shared were moulded and performed inrelation with what participants thought a young female researcher might 'expect' to hear from an 'older person' (Richardson, 2015b;Tarrant, 2016). In doing so, there is scope to explore further in what ways the researcher is imbricated within the place-making practices and performances of participants as a form of co-evolution (Pink, 2008).
Future research on ageing must foreground the multiplicities and practices of older peoples' embodied experiences whilst keeping sight of the performative effect of representations. Thus, older age and place are geo-historically contingent processes which mediate and arise from everyday encounters. There is a need to morethoroughly explore the overlaps between more-than-representational theories and the life-course to further develop relational geographies of ageing. Notes 7. Although walking was the primary method, I was responsive to the needs of participants. As such, some participants planned routes with accompanying prompts (newspapers and photographs), some favoured a go-along, whilst another chose to drive, pausing and walking at significant places (see Kusenbach, 2003 on the 'go-along'). 8. According to the 2011 census, Chorlton is 73.8% White-British. 9. Life-course biographies and histories traditionally consist of a series of semi-structured interview questions about a participant's life and flow chronologically from childhood through to the present. 10. Although Human Geography has been experimenting with innovative methods to assist in the (re)presentation of findings over the past two decades, it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the problems with conventional modes of research dissemination which cannot account for the more-than-representational. Although, see information about a photo and story collection entitled 'Place, Belonging, Manchester: Significant Stories from Manchester and Beyond' that I co-created with participants in a separate research project in Greater Manchester (Barron, 2018a(Barron, , 2018b.