RESEARCH

Aging Activisms is a multi-project program of research that seeks to understand, support, and document diverse stories of activism, focusing on those most often omitted from historical narratives and from the academy. It is comprised of a number of interrelated projects, which collectively challenge popular understandings of what is considered “activism,” including formal protest as well as artistic practices, ceremony, land-based work, and memory projects, among others. These projects also seek to widen notions of “aging” beyond the experiences of people over a certain age, to consider activisms across the lifecourse and our connections as social changers across different generations. Aging Activisms pushes the epistemic and methodological boundaries of social movement and aging scholarship, drawing extensively on intergenerational storytelling processes as critical forms of knowledge production. Specific projects also involve documenting oral histories, facilitating participatory media creation, and analyzing activist archiving practices. 

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As an anti-oppressive collective, we are committed to valuing different knowledges and to engaging critically with what it means to practice research for social change on colonized lands.  

RATIONALE & FOCUS
RESEARCH TRAJECTORY

Projects include: 

watch

First screened at TrentAging2019, this short video offers a bit about what we are learning from our intergenerational storytelling work, and about what this contributes to aging studies.

Ongoing research activities:

FACILITATING INTERGENERATIONAL ACTIVIST STORYTELLING!

Aging Activisms draws on critical storytelling methodologies, which posit storying as important Indigenous, decolonial, feminist, and queer forms of knowledge production. This approach – drawing on group-based storytelling workshops as a form of research – seeks to capture the relational and intergenerational dimensions of knowledge generation, recognizing that contexts and relationships inform how stories are constructed, shared, circulated, and remembered. Through various projects with local and transnational dimensions, Aging Activisms brings groups of activists, artists, academics, and other social changers together across differences in position, background, and generation, to share and produce stories of resistance, and in so doing to theorize and practice radical intergenerationality.

Aging Activisms is a program of activist research, academic mentorship, and intergenerational community-building led by
Dr. May Chazan, Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Gender and Feminist Studies at Trent University.

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Thanks to Ben Hodson for our graphic. The photos on our site have been taken by members of the Aging Activisms research team and our participants and collaborators.