Project updates – act project – Concordia University

New report to British Columbia government on mobile services

Mon, 29 Jul 2019 17:05:30 +0000

ACT researchers were invited by the British Columbia government to submit an intervention as part of the province’s public engagement and legislative review to identify ways to improve cell phone contract and billing transparency. The ACT report, titled “Fair Sales Practices and Affordable Services: The Cell Phone Needs of Canadian Seniors,” emphasizes the need for challenging the current telecommunication landscape, ending aggressive and misleading sales practices, and providing affordable mobile services to all Canadians.

ACT Project held two special panels at the Trent Aging 2019 Conference

Thu, 20 Jun 2019 16:48:37 +0000

ACT Project held two special panels at the TrentAging 2019 Conference, which took place in Peterborough, Ontario, May 28th – 31st. The first one was on older audiences in the digital media environment based on the first wave of the ACT cross-national longitudinal study. The second one was on grandmothers’ social participation and their relationship with ICTs based on the cross-national qualitative study Grannies on the Net.

ACT researchers presented the following four papers as part of the first panel.

How loyal is the most loyal audience of traditional media?
Professor Galit Nimrod, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Media use by Romanian and Dutch older audiences: Do technology generations matter?
Professor Loredana Ivan, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Romania
Professor Eugène Loos, Utrecht School of Governance, The Netherlands
Post Doc researcher Ioana Schiau, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Romania
Media-based leisure styles and wellbeing among older Internet users
Ph.D. Candidate Vera Gallistl, University of Vienna, Austria
Professor Galit Nimrod, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Online surveys targeting older people: Some methodological reflections
Senior Researcher Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Open University of Catalonia, Catalonia, Spain
Post Doc researcher Andrea Rosales, Open University of Catalonia, Catalonia, Spain

ACT researchers also presented the following three papers as part of the second panel.

Negotiating an evolving digital world: Grandmothers’ leisure experiences
Professor Shannon Hebblethwaite, Concordia University, Canada
Strategies of grandmothers in learning to use digital technologies
Post Doc Andrea Rosales, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain
Ph.D. Candidate Daniel Blanche, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain
“We are like children, we need to be guided in this world”: Internet barriers in grandmothers that connect to Internet and how they overcome them
Professor Roxana Barrantes, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Peru
Ph.D. Candidate Daniela Ugarte, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Peru

More about TrentAging 2019:
Take Back Aging: Power, Critique, Imagination
May 28 – 31, 2019, Trent University, Peterborough, Canada

About the Second Joint Conference of NANAS and ENAS

Held at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada, Take Back Aging: Power, Critique, Imagination is the second joint conference organized by NANAS and ENAS that invites researchers, writers, and scholars from all disciplines and at every career stage to share their diverse approaches to conventional fields of gerontology and critical aging studies. We wish to encourage new insights into assumed styles of life and thought, imaginative reflections on the meanings and representations of aging, challenging perspectives from cross-cultural and global experience, and activist strategies to take back aging from those powers and practices that relegate it to the margins of social existence and citizenship.

Organized over four days in May, 2019, we welcome you to explore our beautiful campus, enjoy the vibrancy of our city and forge lasting connections with colleagues from all corners of the academy.

About NANAS and ENAS

The North American Network in Aging Studies (NANAS) was established in January, 2013 by a small group of humanities and social science scholars who were interested in critical examinations of older age that moved away from the experimental sciences and instead spoke to fundamental questions of human existence.

The European Network in Aging Studies (ENAS) was first established in 2010 within the framework of the project “Live to be a Hundred: The Cultural Fascination with Longevity,” funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in the program Internationalization in the Humanities. When the NWO-funded project came to an end in 2013, the European Network in Aging Studies was re-launched as a formal international association located in Graz, Austria.

Call for Student Applications: GUSEGG 2019

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 13:47:15 +0000

For the fifth consecutive year, ACT is sponsoring a module on ageing, communication and technologies as part of the Graz International Summer School Seggau (GUSEGG). The school, which welcomes professors and students from around the world, will be held from June 30 to July 13 2019 in Leibnitz, Austria.

This year, the module on aging will be taught by ACT Director Kim Sawchuk. ACT will partially fund up to five graduate students to attend the school, and will cover tuition and boarding costs. You can learn more about GUSEGG and this year’s school here. For more information about about ACT’s involvement, you can watch a great video “trailer” produced during the summer school in 2016.

This opportunity is open to ACT-affiliated students who have not had the chance to participate in the school. Interested students need to apply to ACT. Applications should be sent to application@actproject.ca by March 18, 2019 and should include:

a 500-word (max) letter on the student’s motivation to attend Graz International Summer School Seggau 2019 and why the topic of the lectures and seminar model is of value to them. The student should especially explain how their research fits within ACT and how they will benefit from courses in the module on ageing, communication and technologies.
A C.V.
The ACT student support form signed by a co-applicant or collaborator (the form is available here) OR a letter of reference written by an ACT co-applicant or collaborator.

Successful candidates will be asked to provide more information to GUSEGG, including academic transcripts and a copy of their passports.

ACT releases the report on the first wave of its cross-country longitudinal study

Tue, 12 Jun 2018 13:38:04 +0000

ACT is pleased to announce the release of the report of the first wave of its cross-country longitudinal study. The report, which is titled Older audiences in the digital media environment: A cross-national longitudinal study, provides an overview of some key findings about seniors’ uses of media from a 2016 wave of quantitative data collection, undertaken in seven countries.

The project involves teams from multiple partnered universities in Austria, Canada, Israel, the Netherlands, Romania, and Spain. It offers a unique opportunity to explore possible processes of displacement of traditional dominant media by innovative communication practices within the older audience of new media. Replicating Nimrod’s (2017) study of older audiences, data is being collected on a biannual basis over a five-year period, for a total of three waves. This first report outlines some of the results from the first wave of the study, which is based on surveys from Internet users aged 60 and up, to whom we will return in the following waves.

Older audiences in the digital media environment: A cross-national longitudinal study (PDF, 1.4MB)

We’re collecting stories about the predatory sales practices of Canadian telecom providers

Wed, 02 May 2018 19:42:40 +0000

Complaints from Canadians about the practices of phone, television and internet providers have increased by 73% in the last year. Media reports relaying situations of abuse, including tactics of overselling and upselling, are also multiplying. Who, exactly, is winning from a system that profits from abusive practices and consumer confusion?

As ACT’s Kim Sawchuk, Constance Lafontaine and Kendra Besanger recently argued in an op-ed published in the Montreal Gazette, seniors, especially those living their later years in situations of financial precarity, are placed at a marked disadvantage.

In collaboration with the Public Interest and Advocacy Centre (PIAC), ACT has set up a phone line to collect stories from older Canadians about dealing with service providers. Call us at 1-800-835-1979 and leave us a short message as well as contact information so we may call you back.

Shannon Hebblethwaite discusses Grannies on the Net on CTV Montreal

Wed, 14 Mar 2018 21:24:37 +0000

On March 14, 2018, Shannon Hebblethwaite appeared on CTV Montreal at noon to discuss her ACT-funded research project Grannies on the Net. Hebblethwaite discusses the roles that ICTs play in the lives of grandmothers, including how they factor in family relationships. For Hebblethwaite’s respondents, digital technologies can represent both “a blessing and a curse”. Watch the full interview below.

Call for student applications: GUSEGG 2018

Wed, 24 Jan 2018 19:49:33 +0000

For the fourth consecutive year, ACT is sponsoring a module on ageing, communication and technologies as part of the Graz International Summer School Seggau (GUSEGG). The school, which welcomes professors and students from around the world, will be held from July 1 to July 14 2018 in Leibnitz, Austria.

1) a 500-word (max) letter on the student’s motivation to attend Graz International Summer School Seggau 2018 and why the topic of the lectures and seminar model is of value to them. The student should especially explain how their research fits within ACT and how they will benefit from courses in the module on ageing, communication and technologies

2) A C.V.

3) The ACT student support form signed by a co-applicant or collaborator (the form is available here).

Successful candidates will be asked to provide more information to GUSEGG, including academic transcripts and a copy of their passports.

Transgenerational research on environmental relationships and aging: A new annotated bibliography

Mon, 08 Jan 2018 19:40:04 +0000

Sonja Pöllänen and Helmi Järviluoma have recently compiled and released a new annotated bibliography on the topic of transgenerational research on environmental relationships and aging. Completed as part of an ACT-funded project, this bibliography brings together recent studies published between 2003 and 2015 concerning intergenerational relations and aging with specific emphasis on environmental relationships. The authors aim for this bibliography to serve as a toolbox for fellow researchers interested in similar themes. They also welcome additions and contributions from readers. Suggestions of entries to this bibliography may be sent to info@actproject.ca with the subject line “Transgenerational research”.

Download the annotated bibliography

PDF version (314 KB)
Word version (48 KB)

Age/ing Waves

Fri, 01 Dec 2017 01:00:18 +0000

Photo credit: Magdalena Olszanowski

By David Madden

This month’s In Focus piece is an update on the ACT-supported Age/ing Waves project. Ageing Waves is an ongoing feminist micro historiography that attends to the specialist players of the ondes Martenot – an electronic musical instrument that made its public premiere in 1928 at the Paris Opera – with a specific focus on the ondists who currently reside in Québec, and who continue to play and perform with the instrument. Marie Bernard, Suzanne Binet-Audet and Geneviève Grenier are older women with international careers in music spanning forty to fifty years, and are members of the Ensemble D’Ondes De Montréal. I have been collaborating with them intermittently for nearly ten years, sometimes with two to three years between each encounter, through a series of semi-structured interviews, music recording sessions, performances and social gatherings. I am also a fan of their work and musicianship.

The Age/ing Waves project centres on the following key questions, all of which are addressed in a chapter of Line Grenier and Fannie Valois-Nadeau’s forthcoming edited collection, The Cultural Mediations of Memory and Ageing. How do affective relationships with musical instruments change through the passage of time? How do musical performers and instruments grow old together? While shifting the focus of typical patrilineal accounts of music and technology, the primary objective is to consider how histories of older women musicians contribute to our understandings of ageing studies and music. In what follows, I discuss some of the collaborative research-creation outputs and processes that have emerged from the project to date and, in particular, a three-minute audio/visual (A/V) ‘project trailer’ that was recently screened at Age 3.0, at Concordia University. The piece weaves together musical recordings, photography, and improvised A/V editing techniques, while incorporating contributions from all of the project’s collaborators. But first, I begin with a brief history of the instrument.

“While shifting the focus of typical patrilineal accounts of music and technology, the primary objective is to consider how histories of older women musicians contribute to our understandings of ageing studies and music.”

The ondes Martenot is a monophonic electronic musical instrument that uses radio technology (two heterodyning radio waves) to produce its many sounds. After the ondes Martenot’s public debut in Paris, the instrument’s inventor, former WWI radiotelegraphic soldier, musician and pedagogue Maurice Martenot (1898-1980), took it on a limited world tour, making it as far as Japan in the early 1930s. The instrument’s popularity with composers, performers, music conservatories and audiences steadily increased throughout Western Europe until the initial post-WWII period. For instance, the well-known French composer and pedagogue Olivier Messiaen premiered Fete des belles eaux (1937), which featured six ondes Martenots, at the 1937 Paris Exposition. However, in the 1940s and ‘50s many of Western Europe’s high-modernist musical elites (including IRCAM’s future founder, Pierre Boulez) deemed the instrument too expressive and vulgar for compositional purposes, and, as result, many influential composers stopped using the instrument in their musical works (including the aforementioned Messiaen). From the 1950s onward, a group of devoted ondists continued studying and performing with the instrument (notably in France and in Canada), and are primarily responsible for the renewed attention it has received from universities, museums, filmmakers, and various popular music scenes in the last twenty years as one of the most important musical instruments of the twentieth century. Yet, very little is known of their careers in music or their musical practices.

In the spring of 2016, I received pilot project funding from ACT in order to conduct and record a series of interviews and musical works with the ondists involved in the project. Unfortunately Binet-Audet was not available to participate in the interviews and recording sessions; however, Grenier and Bernard committed to day-long production engagements. As part of the funding, I was able to include the participation of two members of ACT in Montreal to assist in documenting and recording the activities: Magdalena Olszanowski, a PhD candidate in the Communication Studies Department at Concordia University with extensive image-making experience, and Dr. Samuel Thulin, an affiliated postdoctoral fellow who specializes in mobile music-making and media production. After almost seven months of emails and planning, we established a production schedule that was carried out in November and December of 2016, between Concordia University’s downtown Montreal facilities and Marie Bernard’s home in Charlevoix, QC.

The first session involved interviewing and recording Grenier playing the ondes Martenot in Montreal, with Thulin acting as sound engineer and recordist, and with Olszanowski documenting the process through photography and video. It is also worth mentioning that ACT Associate Director Constance Lafontaine was present for most of the day to conduct the semi-structured interview with Grenier in French. I facilitated the day’s activities and supported everyone through their various encounters. Thulin and Grenier made a special connection while recording; in part, because we made the decision to record her playing the instrument with two stereo microphones, which allowed her to listen to the instrument in the open space of the recording room, rather than through direct input (DI) recording and headphones. This is how Thulin describes the process:

I got the impression that Geneviève has recorded in situations where the assumed technical expertise of engineers has gotten in the way of recording her performances in a way that she finds satisfactory – for instance, engineers insisting on recording the instrument direct. I have to admit, I was flattered that she was so pleased with the results of the way I recorded her instrument (two microphones close to the speaker), and that she told me she felt like it really sounded the way she heard it while she performed.

Olszanowski, Thulin and I then traveled to Charlevoix in December to spend a full day with Bernard at her beautiful home that she shares with her dog, a bouvier de flandres. In addition to conducting a semi-structured interview where we discussed her career as a musician, we recorded her playing some of her favourite pieces composed for ondes Martenot, including ‘Begonia Rex’ (1977), one of her favourite contemporary compositions, written by the Canadian composer Richard Boucher. She also performed an interpretation of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Come in from the Cold’ (1991), and a new original musical work for ondes Martenot and voice. Bernard was in the process of composing a series of works for a solo performance in May, 2017, using just voice and ondes Martenot.

Upon returning to Montreal from our visit with Bernard, the sounds and images collected through these engagements were brought together to form the A/V piece, Age/ing Waves, which was edited using a variety of audio and visual improvisatory editing techniques. The piece gives a three-minute ‘snapshot’ into an A/V performance that is planned for the summer of 2018.

David Madden is an artist and Postdoctoral Fellow with Ageing, Communication, Technologies at Concordia University.

Credits:

David Madden: Project Director
Marie Bernard, Suzanne Binet-Audet, Geneviève Grenier: Featured ondists
Magdalena Olszanowski: Photography & Video Editing
Samuel Thulin: Sound Engineer

Shannon Hebblethwaite and Concordia research on aging featured in the Montreal Gazette

Mon, 27 Nov 2017 19:43:17 +0000

ACT researcher Shannon Hebblethwaite was recently featured in a piece in the Montreal Gazette titled “New research from Concordia examines how we can age well while living healthier, longer“. Hebbelthwaite, who is a professor of applied human sciences at Concordia University and the director of the recently-formed engAGE centre for research on aging, discusses her recent research on intergenerationality, and her ACT-funded work on online communication between grandmothers and grandchildren.