Seniors Media Day at the Atwater Library and Computer Centre in Montreal

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On Friday March 17, our partner the Atwater Library and Computer Centre (ALCC) is organizing a full day of activities under the theme “Seniors Media Day.” This day of events, which is the culmination of ALCC’s “Downsizing Project” conducted in collaboration with ACT, brings together seniors from the community to engage in hands-on workshops, panels and discussions on the topics at the intersections of downsizing in later life and analog/digital technologies. ACT collaborator Eric Craven of ALCC and ACT co-applicant Line Grenier of the Université de Montréal will be part of the day.

 

 

RECAA-ACT Pop Up Restaurant

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Ressources ethnoculturelles contre l’abus envers les aîné(e)s (RECAA) and ACT invite you to their POP-UP Restaurant at Place Commune on March 25th, from 12pm to 2pm in Montreal.

This event is part of a food blog project, Food Talks, À table with RECAA and friends, developed in partnership with ACT. The project has unfolded through four main types of activities: cooking sessions and food forums that invite conversation, participation and inclusion; intergenerational digital skills workshops that focus on the skills required to write blog posts (photography, audio and writing workshops); the production and publication of blog posts and printed promotional cards; and cooking and eating events with partners and friends to favour discussion and raise awareness through community about RECAA’s concerns and mandate. Through this food blog project, RECAA, as an activist organization, strives to develop agency within a contemporary “food culture”.

Come to enjoy recipes from our food blog at foodtalks.recaa.ca and find out more about the project on the ACT project page.

Where: 7669 Querbes, Parc Extension – Wheelchair accessible (Metro Parc, 80 Bus)

When: Brunch will be served on March 25th, from 12pm to 2pm

How much: $8 for a plate; $2 for tea/coffee

Ageing (Wo)Men and their World

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Ageing (Wo)Men and their World will showcase the cross-cultural complexity of the ageing experience through a medley of still and moving images of elders in Montreal. It is a response to the limited (and often, white) representations of ageing in popular culture. The exhibition’s theme is guided by a remix of Nuit Blanche’s Expo theme—the Man and his World.
Ageing (Wo)Men and their World will demonstrate the enthusiastic and active world of elders in Montreal and the different projects that they do, specifically their relationship to and with technology. Examples include: images of women taking photos of each other, or of themselves; women working on a documentary about saris; elders using electronic music technology; and, elders in various Montreal public spaces together. The images and videos will be a mix of already existing imagery from ACT-related members and of new imagery that will be taken specifically for this exhibition and deal more specifically with the intersection of innovation, technology, and the Ageing (Wo)Men and their World.
The purpose is to catch the attention of spectators and those walking by or taking the bus on DoctorPenfield in order to make them re-consider the popular rhetoric of ageing and to contextualize the images.
The exhibition installation uses DIY techniques to mix new and old technologies to present image-based work. Nuit Blanche and it’s Expo 67 theme is the perfect festival to showcase this type of work. These methods also align with Concordia’s enthusiasm for the non-paradigmatic use of technologies and their potential to support critical thought. The Samuel Bronfman Building would be turned into a futuristic ‘pavilion’ with its windows turned into temporary screens.
From 6:00 pm – 1:00 am on Saturday, 4th March, spectators will be immersed in the world of Montreal residents moving in windows of the Samuel Bronfman ‘ACT Pavilion’.
This exhibition is funded by ACT and by the Social Science (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council).
The Curator of Ageing (Wo)Men and their World is Magdalena Olszanowski.

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Les aîné(e)s et leur monde

Pour Nuit blanche, l’édifice Samuel Bronfman de l’Université Concordia se transformera en un pavillon futuriste. Ses fenêtres seront utilisées comme écrans temporaires sur lesquels seront projetés des images représentant les complexités interculturelles du vieillissement L’exposition cherche à repenser les stéréotypes du vieillissement et des technologies et à rendre l’invisible visible.

Loredana Ivan on “Seniors, risk and mobile communication” at IN3

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On July 9, 2015, Loredana Ivan, ACT co-applicant and Professor at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration in Romania, spoke at IN3 at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona. Loredana was at IN3, a ACT partner institution, as a visiting scholar.  Below, you can see a presentation she gave during her stay in Barcelona on “Seniors, risk and mobile communication”. More information on Loredana’s talk is also available on the IN3 website.

 

New “ACT Lunch & Learn” speaker series at Concordia University featuring “Old, Crafty and Connected”

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The ACT project has launched a new “Lunch & Learn” series at Concordia. Each month, a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow is invited to present on their research. Colleagues provide feedback and ask questions in an informal setting. Everyone in the ACT community, from researchers to community partners, is invited to attend. The series kicked off in October 2016 and has been going strong since with monthly presentations and discussions.

This month, ACT-affiliated student and MA student in Media Studies at Concordia University, Nora Lamontagne, will present on her MA project Old, crafty and connected: The Cercle des fermières community in the age of digital networks. 

In her project, Nora’s seeks, first, to understand how the Fermières, as an intergenerational organization with a large membership that includes older women, have incorporated the use of the Internet and digital communications into their organization. Second, it looks to analyze how the incorporation of these digital, on-line platforms reshapes the sense of community present in this longstanding all-female institution.

Pack a lunch and join us in the ACT offices!

Monday, January 23, 2017
12:20-13:30
Samuel Bronfman Building, 4th floor
1590, ave. du Docteur Penfield, Montreal

Kick-off seminar: “Between the Normal and the Abnormal – Cultural Meanings of Dementia and Old Age in Finland and Russia”

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University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu campus, Agora building, Yliopistokatu 4, ​​​​​Auditorium AG106 Program

Tuesday 13 December 2016

Program
10.15 Opening of the seminar
Project leader, professor Maija Könönen, UEF
10.30–11.30 Cultural changes in dementia: Stigmatization and everyday life
Ph.D, director Christine Swane, EGV-Social Inclusion of Older People, Copenhagen
11.30–12.30 Memory and self in dementia and later life depression
Ph.D, Senior Researcher Marja Saarenheimo, The Finnish Association for the Welfare of Older People
Lunch
13.30–14.30 On Attitudes towards old people and ageing in Russia
Ph.D, Postdoctoral researcher Julia Zelikova, St. Petersburg
Coffeebreak
15.00–16.00 Transnational babushka: grandmothers and family making between Russian Karelia and Finland
D.Soc.Sc, Postdoctoral researcher Tatiana Tiaynen-Qadir, University of Turku
Wednesday 14 December 2016
9.15–12.00 Workshop & presentations
9.30–10.00 Sociological dimensions of agency of the persons living with dementia
Professor Jyrki Jyrkämä, University of Jyväskylä
10.15–10.30 On-screen Representations of Alzheimer’s and Dementia: A Work in Progress Report
Professor Andrei Rogatchevski, University of Tromsø
10.30–12.00 Discussion and closing of the seminar Welcome!
Seminar is organized by the research project Between the Normal and the Abnormal – Cultural Meanings of Dementia and Old Age in Finland and Russia (2016–2019), lead by professor Maija Könönen (Russian culture, School of Humanities, UEF) and funded by The Kone Foundation.
Contacts: Sinikka Vakimo, p. 050 4424 377, (Sinikka.Vakimo(at) uef.fi)​

ACT at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference

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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.

Barbara Crow to speak at Inaugural Monday Night Seminar on “The New Shape of Things: Big Data, Big Stories”

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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.

Mini maker fair, fabrication showcase and documentary launch organized by Giuliana Cucinelli and Ann-Louise Davidson

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188h

Joins us at Concordia University on November 3, 2016 for “Making things…And making things private,” a one-day event held as part of Literacy Week organized by ACT co-applicant Giuliana Cucinelli and affiliated researcher Ann-Louise Davidson. A maker fair will be held from 2pm to 4pm, followed by a fabrication showcase and a documentary launch, both to be held from 4pm to 7pm. The event will be held at the Milieux Institute on the 11th floor of the EV building at Concordia University. See the event poster for more details.