Stephen Katz

The Right to a Meaningful Old Age: How integrating arts & culture into health and social services can transform aging Our 2023 visiting scholar, Dr. Anne Basting , offered a comprehensive lecture about the power of art in social services and healthcare systems. Dr. Basting shared stories of her work over 2 decades to bring meaning-making techniques into daily care relationships and to aging and health systems as a whole. These include infusing "Beautiful Questions" into meal delivery and senior companion programs, transforming stigmatized nursing homes into cultural centers, and creating student artists in residence programs where arts students receive room and board for a year to live as a neighbor to elders. On Behalf of the Stephen Katz Visiting Scholar Program and the Trent Centre for Aging & Society, we sincerely thank Dr. Anne Basting for sharing her experience and thoughts with us, and all of those who had the opportunity to attend. ...

The Indigenous Elsewhere of Aging: Elder Epistemologies for Decolonial Futures The 2022 Stephen Katz Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Interdisciplinary Aging Studies was held on Thursday October 6th in the Gathering Space at Trent University.  In her public lecture Dr. Sandy Grande (University of Connecticut) reimagined global aging as a site of possibility; as a conceptual opening for rethinking the central dichotomies and contradictions of contemporary society built on the exigencies of capital and settler hegemony: the centrality of work to existence; of economic growth to production; of age to declining yield, and ultimately of life beyond the productivist logics of capital.  In so doing, she considered how the lives, knowledge and care of Indigenous Elders help to structure conditions for societal renewal.  Her central claim was that Elder epistemologies will become increasingly important as we work collectively to create n...

 On October 16, 2019, our third annual Stephen Katz Lecture in Interdisciplinary Aging Studies was held at Trent University. We welcomed Dr. Kim Sawchuck to discuss critical questions about both AI and the algorithms that profile us as we age.  Building on the critical work of feminist media study scholars such as Wendy Chun, critical race theorists, such as Safiya Noble and age studies scholars such as Barbara Marshall and Stephen Katz on quantified ageing, this talk explored how ageing operates as a critical lens to reveal differential relations of power in present day mediated/consumer cultures. Dr. Kim Sawchuck  is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University and the director of the SSHRC Partnership Grant, Ageing, Communication, Technologies: Experiencing a Digital World in Later Life (actproject.ca). She holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Mobile Media Studies. Dr. Sawchuk’s research focuses on the intersection bet...

 A short video from Trent University in 2012.