Barbara L. Marshall is Professor of Sociology at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada. She has written widely on feminist theory, sexuality and the body, and with her colleague Stephen Katz, has co-authored a series of papers exploring aging, embodiment and sexuality. Her publications have appeared in a range of academic journals and edited collections, including Sexualities, Body and Society, History of the Human Sciences, Sociology of Health and Illness, Men and Masculinities, Medicine Studies, Canadian Review of Sociology, Journal of Aging Studies, Generations, and Science as Culture. In 2006, she was honoured with Trent’s Distinguished Research Award. Her most recent book is a co-edited collection (with A. Kampf and A. Peterson), Aging Men, Masculinities and Modern Medicine (Routledge 2013).
She is involved in two collaborative research projects involving other members of the ACT network. “Digital Culture and Quantified Aging” (with co-investigators Stephen Katz and Isabel Petersen, and collaborator Wendy Martin), funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant (2017-2022), explores ways that emerging digital technologies quantify, track and reshape measures of age and ‘success’ in aging. “Being Connected @Home”, funded by CIHR through the “More Years Better Lives” Joint Programming Initiative (2018-2020) brings together researchers from the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain and Canada (including ACT members Eugene Loos, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Andrea Rosales and Stephen Katz) to investigate contemporary experiences of later life at the intersection of digital infrastructures, place and the experience of ‘being connected’. Other ongoing projects include a critique of the ‘heterosexual imaginary’ that frames ‘third age’ cultural representations; theoretical explorations that bring together age studies, feminist theory, queer theory and disability studies; and explorations of the intersections of gender and age in coverage of Canada’s favourite winter sport – curling!