HI!! This is Karishma. I am a second year graduate student with the Sociology department here at ISU. My interests are in social movements, labor movement, gerentology and Sociology of work and occupation. between my undergraduate and gradaute studies, I worked as a human resources researcher in Chicago for a year. On a personal level, am from Nepal and I have been in the US for about 6 years now. My hobbies include cooking, walking and pets.

For this class, am picking issues and policies realated to "Age Discrimination." Age discrimination includes anything and everything include things such as mandatory retirement, legal age for driving, voting, free bus passes etc.  

There has been much research done in the areas of age based discrimination and ageism. Although these two terms can be used interchangeably, Marshall (2007) defines ageism as an attribution of age based characteristics to an individual in forms of social relations and attitudes. In contrast, age discrimination at workplace is defined as the “use of crude age proxies in personnel decisions relating to hiring, firing, promotion, retraining and, most notably, mandatory retirement” according to Manicol (2006:6). 

I am especailly interested in age discrimination at employement. As many research suggest, this occurs at the stages of hiring, working and firing. This pertains to things likes stereotypes attached to aging workers, firing of older  workers, mandatory retirement and screening out older workers when hiring new workers. I am especially interested in the hiring stages. For this class, however, I iwll be focusing on the broad topic itself. I will however keeep in more specific to my interest in some of the written assignments.

Macnicol, John. 2006. Age Discrimination: Historical and Contemporary Analysis. UK: Cambridge University Press.

Marshall, Victor W. 2007. “Advancing the Sociology of Ageism: A Special Section.” Social Forces 86(1): 257-264.