Knowledge production today is increasingly interdisciplinary and distributed across a variety of societal sectors. Classical academic disciplines are progressively interacting with extra-academic fields and supplemented by new transdisciplinary methods focusing on solving the grand societal challenges, such as health, security, equality, democracy, or globalization. Given the nature of these challenges and the out-dated ways in which the Spanish Retirement Social Systems are been organized in the 21st century, the very notion of jubilación (retirement) needs to undergo a profound transformation within national institutions.
The Fourth Space addresses the signatures of the transformative process in the organization of ground-breaking knowledge on retirement in the social framework of Spain. It has initiated a systematic exploration of the implications of current organizational deterioration and obsoletism on the main levels of Health, Economy, Technology, and Culture. On these bases, it provides an up-dated proposal of reinventing the concept from a well-informed realistic and all-encompassing understanding of the individual, the social, the technological, and the conceptual conditions of the agents, objects, actions, and institutions associated.
Based on cross-dimensional methodologies for integrating knowledge diversity, The Fourth Space outlines reasons for optimism on new potentials as well as deep concerns regarding imbalances in the current Spanish socio-political system. Drawing on a new biophysical and sociocultural schema of life expectancy designed by Neurosurgeon Manuel Maynar, the perceived divide between the current old guidelines that still organize retirement in Spain since 1910 and new beneficial modes of development and evolution is critically discussed, academically investigated, and educationally planned.
Avoiding naive machine-driven metrics, the team leader Prof. Maynar has put together a diverse assembly of innovative knowledge that highlight a heuristic appreciation of different types of impact and modes of thinking on the societal reality of retirement to advance from the Spanish present situation.
From this perspective, a more composite picture of “jubilación” and its social organization emerges from its original implementation in The Fourth Space. It leaves behind the old unreal picture, and situates retired persons in a more complexly rich fourth space of collective identities, networks, and constraints opened by new genuine forms of health, economy, technology, culture, and all other vital social systems shaping our lives as educated and competent adult citizens in the 21st century.