Archive for month: November, 2016
Flipping the camera screen: the importance of imaging technologies in elder communities
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.
ACT at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference
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.
Postdoctoral fellowship/s: Human-Computer Interaction and older people
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 to speak at Inaugural Monday Night Seminar on “The New Shape of Things: Big Data, Big Stories”
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.