This paper discusses new forms and normalization of precarious work in relation to the role of crisis and its different phases as well as interlinkages to other parallel, induces or coming crises. The use of crisis, as well as state- and private global enterprise management of crisis by increasingly fragmenting the global value chains sometimes leaving localities in the global South with dead ends and overused resources, restructuring of the labour forces, inducing unemployment, increasing precarity in the labour market parallel to state interventions that increasingly put pressure on migrants to establish themselves on the labour market – to obtain a residence permit or work permit can besides being a remarkable contemporary cynicism also be understood as a continuous renegotiation of the relation between the global South and North. Empirical examples on the normalization of precarity on the labour market are from the Swedish context linked to a global level and show how the interconnectivity between different interest areas and actors has increased. This also needs to be understood in relation to precarious employment that takes form in a more complex way – in relation to different forms of crisis, war, economic debt, waiting for asylum etc. The findings on the developments of a increasingly precarious labour market in relation to a post-COVID 19 situation with a global work crisis as well as economic crisis, energy crisis, emerging wars and conflicts suggests that new routes into the precarious labour market has been created thus also new vulnerabilities and new norms of atypical work, precarious labour flexibility and where labourers to a higher extent also invest in a highly uncertain and precarious future. This paper suggests that these processes also are linked to a more cynical and complex use of crisis, the prolongation of certain crises and the mobility of crisis.

Over the past 25 years, several books and articles have proclaimed the need to transform the theoretical, conceptual, methodological and/or epistemological practices of the anthropological discipline. These include works by Restrepo and Sandoval (2024), Agostino and Matera (2023), Devisch and Nyamnjoh (2011), Bremen, Ben-Ari and Alatas (2005), Alatas (2006), Yamashita, Bosco and Eades (2004), Kuwayama (2004), Lins Ribeiro and Escobar (2002), and Tuhiwai Smith (1999). Often, these documents are written by researchers from or working in the so-called “Global South”, an expression that signals a an “epistemopolitical” stance (Collyer and Dufoix 2022) rather than geographical origin. One issue often raised in these studies is that of “indigenous” or “native” anthropology. In this context, “indigenous” and “native” refer less to the subject of the study than to a specific approach to practicing anthropology, whereby insiders are considered as the most knowledgeable about the community under study and have the political and scientific right to speak. This counter-hegemonic reaction coincided roughly with the global spread of the postcolonial perspective and the emergence of the decolonial one. This vision of another anthropology has been described as promoting a "decentring" of the discipline (for instance Moore 1996) or seeing it as necessarily "plural" (Agostino and Matera 2023), since it acknowledged the existence of an epistemic hegemony, the center of which was - and still is - located in North America and Western Europe. It also advocated the possibility of "other" anthropologies that would take into consideration both the existence of indigenous knowledge and the anthropological practice by indigenous scholars. Sometimes referred to as "world anthropology(ies)" (Matos, Rosa and Eduardo Dullo 2022; Restrepo 2017; Ribeiro 2005), "critical universalism" (Kilani 2014), "non-hegemonic" (Manifeste de Lausanne 2011) or "post-hegemonic" (Sacchi 2018) anthropology, these epistemological,conceptual and methodological initiatives have paved the way for a renewed - but still rarely implemented - understanding of the anthropological discipline. Among these studies, only a few call for an "indigenous anthropology" (Ramos 2008, 2023; Tuxá 2023; Tengan 2001;Kannaneh 1997). Furthermore, we need to pay attention to the fact that the global rise of "indigenous studies" from 2007 onwards1 was per se interdisciplinary and did not raise the question of the "indigenous" dimension of such and such discipline. However, one of the characteristics of these recent debates about a "decentered" anthropology or "world anthropologies" is that it often obliterates or only quickly mentions that calls for an “indigenous” or “native” anthropology had already been expressed more than 20 years before, beginning in the early 1970s, in a very specific political, intellectual and academic Cold War context.

For the first time in history, a climate change case focusing on aging has been addressed to the European Court of Human Rights. The urgent effects of climate change and the need for a more sustainable future highlight the importance of creating not only age-friendly environments but also environmentally friendly and sustainable aging. In this presentation, we explore ways to move beyond the anthropocentric perspective in aging research. We demonstrate how aging research that is informed by the ontological turn holds the potential to significantly broaden our understanding of aging as an eco-social process and phenomena and how this may have important consequences for issues on increased sustainability. The ontological turn implies that the borders between nature/culture, human/non-human as well as time and place become blurred and even dissolved. The ontological turn means the end of human exceptionalism as we know it. From our reading of important theoretical contributions to the ontological turn we introduce the concept of “interconnected aging,” Interconnected aging brings forwards questions that asks not only how climate changes are affecting aging humans but also how aging humans affect climate changes.

Contemporary processes such as climate change and technological developments makes the incongruity of human exceptionalism in gerontological research all too evident. Consequently, in this article a new perspective in gerontology is suggested: “interconnected gerontology”. This perspective is constructed on perspectives influenced by the “the ontological turn”. This concept provides a theoretical contribution that investigates how altered ontological perspectives can be used to question an anthropocentric worldview as it blurs the boundaries between humans-nonhumans and nature-culture. Such perspectives raise questions that touch upon the direct foundations of human essence, human exceptionalism and rights to nature and resources. At large an interconnected gerontology creates new perspectives of interconnectedness in aging that paves way for important insights and essential questions such as how we live, and age interconnected in sustainable, just, and equal ways.