This series of four events brings together leading scholars who engage with posthumanist thought and its relevance to research on ageing. The Posthumanist turn in ageing studies panels are organized by Stephen Katz in collaboration with the Trent Centre on Aging & Society (TCAS).
Posthumanist ageing and de-centering the human
This panel explores the interface between critical aging studies and posthumanist problems, with presenters questioning how de-centering the human leads to new maps of life (generations, life-courses, life/death boundaries) and forms of care (relational, communal, ecological), as well as critiques of traditional gerontological knowledge-making (aging bodies, subjects, and populations).
Panelists:
Amelia DeFalco, University of Leeds
On posthuman care
Gavin Andrews, McMaster University
All-world aging: A posthumanist gero of all things
Tiago Moreira, Durham University
Calculating and quantifying beyond human aging
October 4, 2021
11am to 1pm EDT/
5pm to 7pm CET
Online
Fragmenting, decolonizing and disrupting ageing
This panel discusses the potential of posthumanist ideas to unsettle and disrupt the violence and racism of settler-capitalist and hetero-patriarchal ideologies of humanism, by introducing new relational and decolonizing approaches to what it means to age and grow older, and conceiving of livable and inclusive aging futures, with the presenters’ radical insights drawn from sexuality, Indigenous, and post-colonial studies.
Panelists:
Linn Sandberg, Södertörn University
Queering ageing futures: Beyond racist imaginaries
Paula Morgan, University of the West Indies
Aging, ancestries and post-colonial trauma
Sandy Grande, University of Connecticut
Indigenous elsewhere’s of aging
October 18, 2021
11am-1pm EDT/
5pm-7pm CET
Online
The materialities of ageing
This panel examines the relationship between new materialist theories in aging studies, technoscientific and digital design, and posthuman conditions of aging, with a focus on the intimate material assemblages of everyday life and their intersection with ecologies of care, datatified economies, and age-based social inequalities, with presenters inspiring questions about more-than-human critical models of later life.
Panelists:
Vera Gallistl, University of Vienna and Anna Wanka, Goethe University, Frankfurt
Connecting the dots of new materialist approaches in age studies and STS – the landscape of material gerontology
Jenny Bergschöld, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Ecologies of aging care and human/machine assemblages
Kim Sawchuk, Concordia University
Materiality and division: GeroTechnological inequalities
November 1, 2021
11am-1pm EDT/
4pm-6pm CET
Online
Ageing in post-human contexts
This panel concludes the symposium with a series of crucial topics on posthuman aging contexts in the era of the Anthropocene, with presentations on alternative thinking about death and dying, aging in rural geographies, and literary reimaginings of human/non-human solidarities, with speakers illustrating the strengths of interdisciplinary approaches to new and often neglected voices and stories of truth about growing older today.
Panelists:
Valerie Blankenbyl, Director
Production: Catpics, Golden Girls Film
Making ‘The Bubble’: Filming in the world’s largest retirement community
Andrew Maclaren, University of Aberdeen
Posthumanist geography and rural ageing
Kathleen Woodward, University of Washington
“Old trees are our parents …”
November 15, 2021
11am-1pm EST/
5pm-7pm CET
Online