While there are no objectively clear distinctions between states of health, improvement, enhancement, optimization, or wellness within these discourses, they are ubiquitous in the proliferation of ‘neuro’ commodities (e.g., brain-stimulants and exercises), ‘neuro’ knowledges (e.g., neuroethics, neuro-marketing) and other ‘breakthrough’ enterprises at the frontier of cerebral subjectivity.
University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu campus, Agora building, Yliopistokatu 4, Auditorium AG106 Program
Tuesday 13 December 2016
ACT co-applicant Margarida Romero was recently interviewed by Le Devoir as part of a series on education and about rethinking the sort of school needed for today’s society. In the article, Margarida explains that we need to approach education as a process in constant innovation. Read the interview here.
When working with elders, it’s important to have a particular sensitivity to their life experience, their knowledge, and the ways in which they have been systematically and systemically excluded from the cultural production that requires ‘new media’. This ‘new media’, that is everywhere around them.
Join us later this week, as several members of ACT present at the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Conference as part of panels organized by NWSA’s Caucus on Ageing and Ageism. The conference is being held from November 10th to 13th at the Palais des congrès de Montréal. The full conference program is available here.
PANEL I: Unsettling the Linear Logic of Age: Narrating Complexity in Later Life (Friday, November 11, 11am – 12:15pm)
Captives of Care: Margaret Atwood’s “Torching the Dusties”
Ulla Kriebernegg, University of Graz
This paper analyses Margaret Atwood’s short story “Torching the Dusties” as a representation of the fourth age as exile. In Atwood’s story, in which a violent anti-elderly mob sets out to burn down nursing homes, the care home as a space of exclusion is a spatial metaphor for the experience associated with old age. A metaphorical reading of such narratives can take us from the concrete to the abstract level, and allow us to think about life on a radical and existential level, leading us to ask the question whether there is an “ideal place” to live and grow old.
PANEL II: Re-Imagining Aging: Creativity in Later Life (Saturday, November 12, 1:45 – 3:00 pm)
Resistance of the Gaze: Women’s Self-Im/Aging
Magdalena Olszanowski, Concordia University
Our ostensibly ubiquitous image-based technology culture is an affront to the aging population. Its image/inary of older women depends on lack of access to technologies for these women and their hyper-invisibility (Meagher 2014). What tactics are women using to resist this ageist culture? For this presentation, I will foreground the multiplicity and incoherence of the gaze by asking how aging women challenge conventional patterns of looking and subsequently demonstrate pleasure in being looked at via image-based technologies. I will use two examples: 1) the feminist resistance of aging self-imaging artists 2) feminist activist imaging work with elders in Montreal.
From PAR to CARR: Media-making and the Art of Activist Ageing
Kim Sawchuk, Concordia University
This paper explores media-making with communities of older adults and institutions (public libraries, social housing groups, and activist organizations) in Montreal to re-imagine what it means to age as an activist in a digitally networked society. Drawing on feminist methods for community engagement through the arts (Cohen-Cruz 2006), PAR/participatory action research (Blair and Minkler 2009) I build on Virginia Eubanks’ CARR or Collaborative Action and Reflection Research (Eubanks 2011) and add “creative” as an essential element to her methodological reflections.
PANEL III: Borders of Belonging in Later Life: Old Age in Indigenous, Minority, and Resistant Communities (Sunday, November 13, 8:00 – 9:15 am)
Ageing Across Species Boundaries
Constance Lafontaine, Concordia University & David Madden, Concordia University
Our paper seeks to emphasize the multiplicity and the connectedness of ageing bodies and life courses by conducting interviews with older women in Montreal, Quebec who share their lives with cats. We seek to explore and vex the notion of “cat ladies,” a term that connotes an older single woman who shares her life with a multiplicity of cats, but a term that also entails the dismissal of a later life lived outside of heteronormative expectations. We explore and record dismissed personal narratives of interspecies love and co-aging that exist through time and across species boundaries.
The Interactive Technologies Group (http://gti.upf.edu/) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF, Barcelona) is looking for and willing to support excellent postdoctoral Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers who are interested in applying for a Beatriu de Pinós (BP) 2016 fellowship so as to conduct a two-year postdoc in the area of HCI and Ageing at a top Spanish university. The candidate/s will be supervised by Prof. Dr. Josep Blat (UPF) and Dr. Sergio Sayago (Universitat de Barcelona).
The purpose of the Beatriu de Pinós programme* is to award 60 individuals grants for the hiring and incorporation of postdoctoral research staff into the Catalan science and technology system. These grants are designed for the incorporation of young researchers (who obtained their PhD between 2007 and 2014 and have not resided or worked in Spain for more than 12 months in the three years prior to date of submission of the application), so that they can improve their professional prospects and obtain an independent research position. Candidates must carry out a research and training project for the entire period of the grant, one that will allow them to progress in the development of their professional careers. Please check the website of the BP programme for further information about procedures, deadlines, and requirements.
The Interactive Technologies Group (GTI) is a research group within the Information and Communication Technologies Engineering Department(https://portal.upf.edu/web/etic/home) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (http://upf.edu). The GTI focuses on human aspects and technology, especially those related to enhancing people’s use of computer technologies. The GTI has been conducting research in the field of HCI and older people (http://gti.upf.edu/digital-inclusion/) over slightly more than a decade (starting in 2004). Four PhD dissertations in the field of HCI and older people have been successfully completed over this period of time. Our research tends to focus on the human aspects of HCI, adopting a strong ethnographic / participant observational approach. Previous research included Web Accessibility and Computer-Mediated Communication. Our current research aims to understand better HCI research and design with, and for, older people, by exploring, for instance, digital games, Embodied Conversational Agents, everyday emotional digital experiences, wearable computing, PD and DIY.
Barbara Crow, co-applicant in ACT, Dean and AVP Graduate in the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at York University will be a speaker at this year’s Inaugural Monday Night Seminar organized by the McLuhan Centre for Culture & Technology and the Faculty of Information (iSchool) at the University of Toronto. This year’s discussions are centred on the theme of “The New Shape of Things: Big Data, Big Stories”. See here for more information and to reserve your spot.
From October 14 to 16, 2016, the third annual ACT meeting took place in Castelldefels, Catalonia, Spain. This year, it was the ACT partner IN3 at the Open University of Catalonia (OUC) that welcomed the ACT team. Some 35 ACT members, including co-applicants, collaborators, community members and students, travelled from North and South America, Europe and Asia to participate in the meeting.
Over the past few years, the format of the meeting has been rather consistent: we meet for three days and hold a mix of presentations and discussions, all of which tend to be colloquial and informal in tone. Researchers and community members who have been funded in the past year by ACT are invited to present, briefly, on their work. This makes up the bulk of the three days. The idea behind this approach is for projects to be presented at whatever stage they may be, so as to cultivate an awareness of the projects that are newly in the works at ACT. Sometimes, ideas and rough plans are brought to the group for feedback. Researchers also present results and share publications. Updates the ACT activities in Montreal, the goings-on of the working groups, and the unfolding of the ACT-sponsored summer schools like the Women Ageing Media (WAM) Summer School and the Graz University Summer School Seggau (GUSEGG) are presented.
Since receiving funding in 2013, ACT has organized a public talk each year and invites a keynote speaker. To connect with the host locale, ACT also extends an invitation to the local university community to join the ACT group for these few hours (Montreal and Castelldefels) or combines the meeting with a local event (Bucharest). Over the last three meetings, keynote addresses have been an opportunity to build up the profile of ACT and ageing studies in our respective locales, to meet and exchange with researchers outside of the group, and to give us a collective opportunity to engage with and react to an in-depth research presentation. This year, the UOC organizing team invited Professor Feliciano Villar from the University of Barcelona. His presentation centred on the concept of generativity in later life, with an emphasis on how this concept operates within the context of Spain. As Professor Villar argued, generative ageing is one way to question current discourses on ageing, including positive, successful and active ageing, a position that sparked a lively discussion and debate.
During the meetings, and to ignite debate, discussions are organized on specific topics that the ACT Governing Board has selected. This year, two themes were identified: one on representations of age and ageism and another on quantitative methods. Inspired by the WAM Manifesto and at the instigation of local organizers, another conversation identified the need and desire to write an ACT manifesto for conducting non-ageist or age-aware research. The idea was received with enthusiasm and a working group of seven researchers from Canada, Finland, Spain, the UK, and the US was immediately formed.
At the end of each day, even when we are all tired after hours of presentations and discussions, we often find ourselves still eager to spend time together. The students, Grannies on the Net researchers and the Governing Board all hold meetings to hash out research ideas and make future plans. We share meals, and sometimes, when the conditions are just right, we dance.
Over the past few years, we have tried to develop a meeting formula that is representative of what we want ACT to be. We seek to be intellectually rigorous, critical and productive in intervening in a multiplicity of discourses on ageing, communication and technologies across disciplines. We also seek to be inclusive, to valourize a diversity of approaches and frameworks, and, especially, to foster a membership that is happy to spend time together, develop shared goals, and work collaboratively within the ACT project.
Perhaps one of the most salient markers of the success we’ve had in regard to the latter point has been the emergence of collaborations at meetings that continue to feed our activities for the next year. One just needs to listen in on a few conversations at dinner or during the breaks to see this in action: people express interest in joining projects and in replicating or adapting them in their settings. Others people are eager to borrow pedagogical tools or to invite a fellow ACT member to give a workshop or keynote. Ideas for ACT panels and guest talks are pitched. Working groups, journal issues, and books are plotted. Some of these ideas seem speculative one year, then we find out that they have come to past the next.
ACT is indebted to the enthusiasm and organizational prowess of the hosts of the 2016 meeting. Daniel Blanche, a PhD student at UOC who has been working with many of us since before ACT came to be, has put countless hours in the organization of this ACT meeting. Adrien Semail, a MA student at UOC who is a recent addition to the ACT team, did a similarly outstanding job. Finally, we are grateful to ACT Co-applicant and Director of the Telecommunication Technologies stream, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, who offered to host this meeting and who welcomed us all so warmly.
