Current Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Social impact assessment as a concept and practice is generally framed as a process for delivering socially equitable outcomes, and in particular, a vehicle for improving the lives of society’s most vulnerable and marginalised people. For example, the International Association for Impact Assessment 2015 guidance document makes the normative statement that projects should benefit local communities and be a ‘force for positive social change and beneficial social development’. Yet most guidance provides little prescription for what this looks like in practice. More recently, the New South Wales 2021 guideline includes distributive equity as a principle for social impact assessment, but its application is yet to be tested. This article discusses key dimensions of equity concepts, drawing on international social impact assessment guidance documents, academic literature on equity, fairness and justice, and case studies in Australia. We elaborate process/procedural/participative and outcome/distributive dimensions of equity. We further argue that, to reflect the International Association for Impact Assessment position, social impact assessment needs to defend its normative purpose of advancing equity, rather than simply ‘considering’ equity impacts.

Current Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Over the last 20 years, ageing has been studied through the lens of an active ageing perspective, which considers older adults as responsible for their own conditions. However, the COVID-19 health emergency has highlighted its limits. Drawing on a sample of semi-structured interviews – collected before and during the pandemic – with people aged 65 years and above who are self-sufficient and live in Turin, Italy, this article explores the representations and perceptions of ageing, to highlight the possible effects of the COVID-19 emergency. The results show that representations of ageing revolve around two fundamental viewpoints: one considers older adults as a cost for the community because of their unproductiveness; the other overlaps the loss of self-sufficiency with a definition of ‘real’ old age. Furthermore, the interviews introduce a distinction between those who – considered productive despite their age – were called to provide a service to the community during the lockdown, and those who were judged vulnerable because of their age. Such ambiguous messages have raised new questions about an active and successful ageing imperative.

Current Sociology, Ahead of Print.
When we ask people to tell us the story of their lives, it is not the full extent of their biographies that we have access to, but only a partial version of it. Biographical narratives are permeated by processes of selection that imply highlighting some things while omitting others. Most of the time, what is left unsaid cannot be fully acknowledged, precisely because it is not explicitly verbalised. In the scope of the research project Biographical echoes, we were able to identify significant events and relationships in a person’s life that were not disclosed in autobiographical accounts but were unveiled in hetero-biographical ones by close people who were interviewed about that person’s life. The triangulation of data allowed us to access elements of a biography that would otherwise have remained unseen. By taking omissions as units of analysis, we characterised their main features and identified three distinct profiles of omissions using a Multiple Correspondence Analysis: relational, light and taboo. We argue that the act of omitting something is a meaningful social action with implications at both the biographical and analytical levels.