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

ACT is accepting travel funding applications for the ENAS-NANAS conference in Graz

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ACT is accepting funding applications from ACT-affiliated researchers (namely co-applicants, collaborators and affiliated students) for the 2017 ENAS-NANAS meeting to be held at the University of Graz from April 27 to 30 2017. A limited number of partial funding travel grants, corresponding to the costs of air travel, will be made available. In such cases when solely train travel is preferred over a flight, train travel can be reimbursed. Those interested in applying for funding can do so by sending an email by February 5, 2017 to “application (at) actproject (dot) ca”. Those who apply should be able and willing to book their flight through ACT by February 24, 2017.

In this application email, please include.

  1. Your name and affiliation
  2. Provide the title of the presentation and the abstract that was submitted and accepted to the 2017 ENAS-NANAS conference
  3. If you are presenting as part of an organized panel, please send the title of the panel and the names of the other panel members.
  4. If you have been previously funded for travel by ACT, include the date (month and year) of the last time you were funded (excluding ACT annual meetings).
  5. Provide all the information we need to book your flight (your departure and arrival dates, cities of arrival and departure, your full name as stated on your passport, your date of birth, and your phone number). You will be consulted before the booking takes place and will get a chance to review the flight.
  6. If you are a ACT-affiliated student or postdoctoral fellow, please include a letter from the sponsoring ACT member (collaborator or co-applicant) or, alternatively, the sponsoring ACT member can send an email to the appropriate email address by the deadline. This letter or email should simply and clearly state that the senior researcher supports the student or postdoctoral fellow’s request for funding.

ACT based research on aging and cognito-politics

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While there are no objectively clear distinctions between states of health, improvement, enhancement, optimization, or wellness within these discourses, they are ubiquitous in the proliferation of ‘neuro’ commodities (e.g., brain-stimulants and exercises), ‘neuro’ knowledges (e.g., neuroethics, neuro-marketing) and other ‘breakthrough’ enterprises at the frontier of cerebral subjectivity.

Read more →

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.