Matthew Lariviere’s and Barbara Pieta’s mandate as convenors came to an end yesterday at the AGENET Annual Meeting during the EASA 2022 Conference. We are thrilled to announce that the team of three new AGENET convenors has been appointed for the period of 2022-2024. Congratulations to Swetlana Torno (Max Planck Institutute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity), Simone Anna Felding (German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases) and Francesco Diodati (Independent Researcher)! Another warm welcome to Irina Kretser (St. Petersburg State University) who is taking on the role of AGENET Web editor and Social Media Coordinator.
Thank you to the outgoing AGENET Working Team, and good luck to the new one! Below you can get to know the new Team and their plans for our network.
NEW AGENET Convenors (2022-2024)
Dr. Francesco Diodati
Ph.D. in Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
Email: f.diod92@gmail.com
I have recently completed my Ph.D. in Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Milano-Bicocca. My dissertation focused on the political and institutional recognition of caregiver’s fatigue in Emilia-Romagna, Northern Italy. I conducted an ethnographic fieldwork among support groups, home care training courses, and public conventions on both unpaid family caregiving and paid home care for the elderly. In 2020, I was awarded the Margaret Clark Award for my paper Recognizing Caregiving Fatigue in the Pandemic: Notes on Aging, Burden and Social Isolation in Emilia-Romagna, Italy. As the AGENET co-convenor, my plans are to contribute to spreading the mission of our network in other countries, where there are an emergent generation of young researchers in the field of aging, intergenerational relationships, and social change. I believe that our network will benefit from the creation of new collaborations and memberships.
Simone Anna Felding
PhD student at German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) Witten, Germany
Email: Simone.felding@dzne.de
My name is Simone Anna Felding and I am a PhD candidate at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) Witten. I am an anthropologist carrying out research into the use of social robots for people with dementia in nursing homes as part of the Marie-Curie ITN program DISTINCT. As part of my PhD I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Danish nursing homes who have pet robots to try to understand what and how these robots become when they are used in practice. Besides DZNE, I also collaborate with the Karolinska Institute, Alzheimer Europe and the University of Copenhagen in my PhD. I look forward to being the co-convenor of AGENET. I have enjoyed being a member and attending many of the great events that have been organized. I will do my best to follow in the footsteps of Matthew and Barbara and look forward to getting to know all of you in the network even better.
Dr. Swetlana Torno
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen
Email: torno@mmg.mpg.de
I am junior researcher in Social Anthropology with research interests in ageing, migration, life-course, gender and care in Tajikistan, Central Asia. In May 2022, I joined the Max Planck Research Group ‘Ageing in a Time of Mobility’ as a postdoctoral research fellow and I am based at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. I received my PhD from Heidelberg University and served as AGENET website editor from 2021 until today. My plans as AGENET co-convenor in 2022-2024 include facilitating an active community life through the organization of webinars, workshops, the AGENET biannual meeting, and the AVA award; supporting the incoming website editor in expanding the AGENET website (e.g. resources, ethics collective, countries blog); and strengthening the AGENET ties to/between researchers and research groups based in different European countries (e.g. country/area liaisons, work-in-progress discussions).
New AGENET Web editor and Social Media Coordinator
Dr. Irina Kretser
Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnic Sociology, St. Petersburg State University, Russia
Email: i.kretser@spbu.ru, kretser@list.ru
My main research interest is anthropology of kinship with special attention to siblingship, kinship networks, intersection of kinship, mobility and technologies.I have experience as the participant of the international research projects, the organiser of international conferences, and as the media editor of group ‘Anthropology Today’ in Russian social network. As AGENET web and media editor I plan to run AGENET’s Twitter account (in addition to AGENET’s Facebook and site). Besides re-posting announcements from the site, I plan to post in AGENET’s Twitter and Facebook account relevant for AGENET content: announcements of conference, seminars, workshops, new books and new journals’ volume, educational and job opportunities, etc. I suggest a new subpage at the website concerning relevant to AGENET new published books. It can be a section with new books or regular thematic section (themes can be defined with AGENET convenors).
AGENET 