Panels and presentations

This keynote will feature thought-provoking stories about activist aging, which call on us to rethink the core assumptions embedded within prevailing narratives, policies, and frameworks of “successful aging.” Dr. May Chazan will explore emerging findings from a multi-year project of intergenerational activist storytelling based at Trent University (in Peterborough, Ontario), asking how storytelling research might challenge dominant ways of understanding aging. Her work calls into to question widespread presumptions that certain bodies, minds, experiences, and subjectivities are deemed successful in later life, while others are either erased entirely from aging discourse or considered to be sub-optimal. The stories she offers open spaces for better understanding and supporting diverse aging futures.

Much of the rhetoric around smart cities focuses on technology-centric approaches. Health, as we know, is far more complex than technology and medical solutions might suggest. Understanding health and ageing requires us to grapple with the complexity that is the social (Gawande 2015). Increasingly technologies are being designed with the notion of the social at its core through human-centric approaches. The datafied and algorithmic city is one in which the human (and its biases) can take a variety of ways—from redlining to playful cities. How might we playfully co-future for cities with growing ageing populations?

This talk focuses on creative and ethnographic approaches to how we might recalibrate the city as a playful and creative place that fosters ageing well. My approach is as an interdisciplinary maker and ethnographer interested in how we can learn from participants’ everyday practices to design together a social future for cities that places the importance on playful and creative intervention. I will draw from fieldwork conducted with older adult Pokémon Go uses, along with creative practitioners, to explore how we might curate conversations around ageing as a positive, playful and creative activity.