In their recently released book, Unsettling Activisms: Critical Interventions on Aging, Gender, and Social Change (Women’s Press, 2018), editors May Chazan, Melissa Baldwin, and Patricia Evans present compelling reasons why our common perceptions of activisms and activists need to be expanded; specifically, expanded to include the work of older women activists.
ACT research assistant, Nora Lamontagne’s article, “Simpler Than Ever? Online Grocery Shopping With Seniors” was published in the September issue of Milieux’s Pause Button, on online publication about technology and culture.
Each year in July, GUSEGG provides a unique opportunity for professors and students from around the world to explore new ideas and dive into challenging topics. It is intensive, personal, intimate, and distinct from a typical university setting. Students and professors learn together from early morning until late evening in a setting where critical thought and challenging conversations extend beyond the walls of the classroom.
ACT co-applicant Martine Lagacé, a professor at the University of Ottawa was recently named to the National Seniors Council (NSC). The NSC’s mission is to consult with Canadian seniors, experts and other stakeholders so as to advise the federal government and inform public policy on matters related to the health and well-being of older adults. Lagacé brings to the NSC a wealth of expertise in the area of ageism and age-based discrimination. She will serve as part of the Council until June 2020.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has recently opened an official inquiry into the “use of misleading or aggressive telecommunications services providers.” And, as of August 2018, we are actively encouraging Canadians – especially older adults – to participate in this important consultation process.
This month’s In Focus article comes to us from Dr. Sakari Taipale at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. Taipale is a research group leader for the Centre of Excellence in Research on Ageing and Care (CoEAgeCare), which studies the transformations in ageing in a digital age through analyses of everyday life and societal and policy change. In his paper, Taipale considers the ways in which digitalization of everyday life has shifted the ways we think about age and ageing.
ACT is pleased to announce the release of the report of the first wave of its cross-country longitudinal study. The report, which is titled Older audiences in the digital media environment: A cross-national longitudinal study, provides an overview of some key findings about seniors’ uses of media from a 2016 wave of quantitative data collection, undertaken in seven countries.
The project involves teams from multiple partnered universities in Austria, Canada, Israel, the Netherlands, Romania, and Spain. It offers a unique opportunity to explore possible processes of displacement of traditional dominant media by innovative communication practices within the older audience of new media. Replicating Nimrod’s (2017) study of older audiences, data is being collected on a biannual basis over a five-year period, for a total of three waves. This first report outlines some of the results from the first wave of the study, which is based on surveys from Internet users aged 60 and up, to whom we will return in the following waves.
Older audiences in the digital media environment: A cross-national longitudinal study (PDF, 1.4MB)
une 15 is World Elder Abuse Awareness Day (WEAAD). It was initiated by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations in 2006, and serves as a day for the world to voice its opposition to the mistreatment of seniors. In Montreal, ACT’s community partner Respecting Elders: Communities Against Abuse (RECAA) uses the day to inclusively raise awareness of elder mistreatment and elder abuse, by way of theatre practices, creative interventions and hand-to-hand leafleting in the streets.
ACT is pleased to announce the recipients of the ACT Student Bursaries, which are awarded annually to students enrolled in master’s or doctoral programs in ACT partner universities, and who are conducting research on the intersections of ageing, communication and technologies as part of their thesis projects.
Sarit Okun is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, working under the supervision of Galit Nimrod. She was born on a religious kibbutz to the south of Israel, and raised in an orthodox Jewish society that observes a Torah and Halacha. Thus, the religious environment has always been a significant and central part of her way of life. Okun’s current research, entitled “Online Spirituality in Later Life,” seeks to understand whether and how online religious activity contributes to the lives of seniors. For this study, a Participatory Action Research (PAR) program with 26 religious elders is being conducted, with plans to share the results in a new website built for the purposes of the study. As Okun writes:
“I believe that PAR with an adult group is an excellent way to learn deeply about the positive and negative contribution of online religion to the older population. I wish to take this opportunity to thank ACT wholeheartedly for the award, and hope that my research will be useful and will help theoretical and practical aspects of ACT research.”
The other recipient of the student bursary is Karine Bellerive. Bellerive is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, under the supervision of Line Grenier. She is particularly interested in self-writing practices and their value as modes of knowledge production, as well as issues related to memory and ageing. Her thesis project is entitled, Exploration de la force performative des écritures de soi-s par une recherche-création féministe : vieillissements et devenirs (roughly translating as Exploration of the performative strength of self-writing through a feminist research creation project: aging and becoming). She explores writing through writing, and questions what can emerge from self-writing processes. Karine is also a lecturer in the Department of Letters and Communications at the Université de Sherbrooke, where she has been teaching theories of communication and writing since 2008, and where she has been involved in various educational committees. As Bellerive reflects, “I would like to say that it is an honour for me to have been awarded this scholarship and to formally integrate the ACT research group, whose projects and mission are really inspiring. I hope that my contribution will be as inspiring for the other members”.
Complaints from Canadians about the practices of phone, television and internet providers have increased by 73% in the last year. Media reports relaying situations of abuse, including tactics of overselling and upselling, are also multiplying. Who, exactly, is winning from a system that profits from abusive practices and consumer confusion?
As ACT’s Kim Sawchuk, Constance Lafontaine and Kendra Besanger recently argued in an op-ed published in the Montreal Gazette, seniors, especially those living their later years in situations of financial precarity, are placed at a marked disadvantage.
In collaboration with the Public Interest and Advocacy Centre (PIAC), ACT has set up a phone line to collect stories from older Canadians about dealing with service providers. Call us at 1-800-835-1979 and leave us a short message as well as contact information so we may call you back.