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 and academic narratives. It comprises several interrelated projects, which collectively challenge popular understandings of what is considered “activism” to include formal protest as well as artistic practices, ceremony, land-based work, memory projects, and more. These projects also expand notions of “aging,” considering 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 on intergenerational storytelling as a critical form of knowledge production.
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.
Projects include:
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Stories of Resistance, Resurgence, and Resilience in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough, Canada): 2016-2020
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Jean Koning Collections: 2016-18
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Montreal Media Capsules: 2016
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GRAN Archives: 2013-16
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Older Women’s Activisms and Solidarities: 2013-16
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.