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.
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.
Earlier this spring, I met up with my dad as he finished hiking the final kilometres of the Bruce Trail, which is a 900 km trek through South-Central Ontario. As a master’s student with a background in leisure studies, I was curious to learn about my dad’s decision to hike this strenuous trail and to know why he decided to do it now, in retirement.
The “Fragment de Vie/Fragment of Life” exhibit was the final result of a three-month introductory digital photography workshop facilitated by Myriam Lebel-Bernier and Ashley McAskill, two graduate students and ACT research assistants from Concordia University.
This month’s InFocus piece captures some of the great moments of last weekend’s Aging Activisms Media Capsules Workshop, a collaboration between Trent University and Concordia University.
Here’s the link to the story: https://storify.com/ACTProject/aging-activisms-media-capsules-workshop
Every year in July, more than 80 students and 10 professors from over 30 countries meet at the Graz International Summer School Seggau (GUSEGG) in Southern Styria, Austria to discuss global developments and challenges in areas such as society, politics, economics, religion, and culture. As in previous years, students from all over the globe will participate in the summer school and ACT will award a number of ACT-affiliated students with scholarships to participate in the Ageing Studies Workshop – one of seven thematic afternoon workshops at GUSEGG.
What happens when you introduce a 70 (ish) year old community radio host to a 25 (ish) year old sound artist and ask them to organize ten years worth of community radio interviews?
Wikipedia has become an indispensable source of online information for students and researchers because of its ease of use as well as its reputation as a user-generated encyclopaedia of shared knowledge. But is it? Our research suggests a much more complicated and twisted tale. Wikipedia is a space of negotiation, contestation and struggles over inclusion and exclusion into “encyclopedic” knowledge.
Dr. Ros Jennings is Head of Post-graduate Research at the University of Gloucestershire UK, looking after over 500 research students in their learning about research methods. Passionate about music, life stories, gender and ageing, Dr. Jennings is the founder of the Centre for Women, Ageing and Media (WAM) and a collaborator of the Ageing and Communication Technologies (ACT) project.
During a short visit to Montreal, Dr. Ros Jennings stopped by the ACT office and happily shared some of her current and forthcoming research, as well as her vision about ageing, media, and gender. “There is a tight connection between studying approaches to identities through music, memory, personal storytelling, and ageing; and I demonstrate it in my current research,” states Dr. Jennings. For her, music is a cherished topic for many people, because it can say a lot about their identity as it closely relates to personal taste and family histories (such as the passing on of values to future generations). Using soft-end qualitative research methods, Dr. Jennings prioritizes research that relates to participants’ experiences and emotions. In doing so, she gives priority to their personal voices and experiences. In addition, her research integrates feminist and activist perspectives, which, by tradition, aim to give voice to people who haven’t had the chance to speak up in society.
In 2007, Dr. Jennings, with a small group of academics from diverse disciplines, formed a research network called WAM – the Centre for Women, Ageing and Media – in the University of Gloucestershire. Interested in questions around media, film, television studies, and age, researchers started holding informal meetings to brainstorm the mission and scope of this network. WAM were awarded an Arts and Humanities research grant to run a series of workshops around the UK to raise awareness about the issue of women, media and ageing, through various themes such as visibility and invisibility, commodification, older non-heterosexual identities, media representation, and mediating the body. Given the major international interest in the topic, other experienced scholars in ageing studies joined the network, curious to learn about media and representation. This formed an even more interdisciplinary mix of academic researchers.
In 2013, WAM joined the ACT project. As one of its key research partners, it continues to share resources and interests with researchers throughout Europe and beyond. WAM has held international conferences and summer school every year, for the past three years. “It’s been so useful, pivotal in generating a set of resources of working in age studies,” shares Dr. Jennings. Focusing on the amalgamation of topics and methodologies around ageing and media, the summer school’s participants include students, scholars, and university professors who are interested in learning about implementing questions of ageing in their own research.
Dr. Jennings is currently finishing a research project on life stories related to the variety of ways people access music, including tunes they have not chosen (i.e. from a radio). Her research includes questions related to digital media, such as the (lack of) materiality in the new technologies related to music. Next year, through WAM, she is starting a major book project with her colleague Ab Gardner called EuroVision – Music and Ageing Across Cultures, which will cover personal stories of project participants from all over Europe. Stay tuned.
