Stephen Katz

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...

Ageing in Everyday Life: Materialities and Embodiments Edited by Stephen Katz Policy Press, 2018 Applying interdisciplinary perspectives about everyday life to vital issues in the lives of older people, this book maps together the often taken-for-granted aspects of what it means to age in an ageist society. Part of the Ageing in a Global Context series , the two parts address the materialities and the embodiments of everyday life respectively. Topics covered include household possessions, public and private spaces, older drivers, media representations, dementia care, health-tracking, dress and sexuality. This focus on micro-sociological conditions allows us to rethink key questions which have shaped debates in the social aspects of ageing. International contributions, including from the UK, USA, Sweden and Canada, provide a critical guide to inform thinking and planning our ageing futures.

 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.