The Age and Generation Network is pleased to announce the conference:
Kinning, Moving, and Growing in Later Life
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, 14-15 March 2024
organized in collaboration with
Piera Rossetto, Department of Asian and North African Studies.
Climate change, ageing populations, trans/national mobility, violent conflicts, shrinking welfare spending, digitalization, pandemic(s) and the growing need for care are profoundly transforming the way people live in the world and interact with each other. While far-reaching and global in their dimensions, these challenges intersect in multiple ways and are experienced differently depending on geographical location, social context and position in the life course. Across the globe, people are working on different ways of addressing these challenges and imagining alternative futures locally as well as globally.
This conference focuses on processes, imaginaries and activities surrounding older age, ageing and generations in light of contemporary challenges. Situating these categories in the current moment, we would like to examine what happens to them on a discursive level, on an imaginative level as well as on the ground and in daily practices. We ask, how older age, ageing and generations, understood as life course stages, temporal processes, relations and activities, come to play and how are they reworked in contemporary contexts. As well as what role particular social spaces, geographic localities and cultures play. Departing from these questions, this conference conceptualizes ageing and generations through the lens of kinning, moving, and growing in later life.
Kinning here refers to processes of creating kinship relations through substances and practices such as blood, co-residence, care and nurturing. The reverse activity, de-kinning, has highlighted the process of dissolving and hiding kin or household relationships. Many studies point to the ways care serves as a central element in kinning/de-kinning practices. Kinning and de-kinning capture the creation, maintenance or dissolution of kinship, gender and generational work in different contexts: migration and displacement, pandemics, care work and public care institutions, state and political organizations, technologies and more-than-human relations (e.g., animals, ancestors, microorganisms, lands).
Moving indicates the trans/national migratory realities that characterize the life of many (older) individuals, families and communities around the globe and that have multi-layered implications for communication, social interactions and care-giving between generations. It also speaks to older adults’ movements through social spaces such as home, (health) care facilities, built environments, places of worship and recreation, different geographical locations as well as to bodily movements that might be facilitated by technologies or experienced as distressing when aspired mobility is declining in later life. Within this thematic area equally falls the (im)mobility of care represented in the person of informal or paid care-givers or in the manifold skills and technologies of care that can (or cannot) substitute inter-personal caregiving.
Growing pertains to generativity in the processes of ageing and might also include the emergent and productive nature of memory and remembering/forgetting. It captures the simultaneity of different generations sharing one time-space, while at the same time looking upon the problems arising in this world and experiencing them from a different generational lens and position in the life course. Generations might negotiate their shared time and imagine futures differently. They can pass on memories and experiences between each other or decide to interrupt the circulation of particular knowledge. Growing also refers to population ageing around the world and growing cities, where care is becoming a scarce good and has to be re-organized (e.g., different care institutions, digital technologies and more-than human care actors, or special housing for older adults).
Programme
Day 1: March 14th 2024
| 9:00-9:30 | Registration (Foyer of ADM) | |
| 9:30-11:00 | Greetings (Room: ADM) Francesco Diodati, Simone Anna Felding, Swetlana Torno & Piera Rossetto Plenary debate (Room: ADM) A&A Debate: Debating the Role of Technology in Kinship and ‘Desirable’ Aging Futures featuring Jacob Sheahan: “Navigating Mediated Kinship and Care while Ageing-in-Place” Sayendri Panchadhyayi: “Technologized intimacies and hybrid kinship in later-life support” Miguel Gomez Hernandez: “Anthropological research in ageing futures” Shivangi Patel: “Digital Kinship: The Future calling…” Gomathy K N: “Technology a co-actor in kinning and ‘desirable’ aging?” Moderators: Christine Verbruggen & Jason Danely | |
| 11.00-11:30 | Coffee Break (Canteen, ALFA building) | |
| 11:30-13:00 | Panel 1A: Transnational Aging Trajectories (Room: ADM) Moderator: Swetlana Torno Golden Age is yet to come: life horizons of European South Asians between retirement and family care Sara Bonfanti Pre-retirement migrants’ home-making in Hungarian periphery: ageing and agency Krisztina Németh & Monika Váradi The migrant ageing conundrum: The Case of the Ukrainian Women in Venice Lucrezia Alice Moschetta & Sabrina Marchetti “Where can we go?” On migration, ageing, and immobility Laura Ferrero | Panel 1B: Images and Cultural Values of Ageing Well (Room: SCGZ) Moderator: Francesco Diodati The Lives of Qilao During COVID in New York City: Creating community in a Chinatown senior center Shuting Li “Aging well”: Questioning healthy ageing in elderly people’s experience Raffaella Ferrero Camoletto, Rachel Demolis, Mihaela Gotea & Diana Bodi Growing relations with and through time: Brexit-Covid19, affective registers, and intergenerational thinking Cathrine Degnen The Chief of the Lähiö: Urban Citizenship, Future-Making and Retirement in Helsinki, Finland Stefan Millar |
| 13:00-14:30 | Lunch break | |
| 14:30-16:00 | Panel 2A: Envisioning Care across Home and Community (Room: SCGZ) Moderator: Maria Louw Self-organization and civil initiatives among older adults in rural Hungary Dóra Gábriel & Noémi Katona Entangled and unsettled care: Ayah – intervened ageing and dying in contemporary India Sayendri Panchadhyayi Dementia care in the context of globalized ageing Justine McGovern Carcerality’s kinships: Regenerative alternatives to Japan’s aging prisons Jason Danely | Panel 2B: Digital and more-than-Human Dimensions of Ageing (Room: ADM) Moderator: Simone Anna Felding Digital technology and ageing in place in post-pandemic Italy: Preliminary results of the fourth wave of the longitudinal study “ILQA_19” Francesco Diodati Multispecies kin making in later life: Insights from elderly middle-class organic home gardening practices in South Asia Gomathy K.N Beyond the diagnosis label: Making sense of dementia in more-than-human moral worlds Cristina Douglas Falling in the AgeTech industry visions of futures for older adults Miguel Gomez Hernandez Re-kinning (grand)parenting through digital technology: thinking with the ways older Parisians and their younger relatives reconfigure care and relationality Sophie Colas |
| 16:00-16:45 | Coffee break (Canteen, ALFA building) | |
| 16:45-18:15 | Workshop: On (hidden) visuality of anthropology of ageing, care and the life course (Room SCGZ) Organizors: Barbara Pieta, Paolo Favero & Martina Laganá | |
Day 2: March 15th 2024
| 9:00-9:30 | Registration (Foyer of ADM) | |
| 9:30-11:00 | Panel 3A: Kinship, Generations and Tensions (Room SCGZ) Moderator: Barbara Pieta Navigating care and conflict: An ethnographic inquiry into intergenerational and gender dynamics in grandparenting among urban migrants in Eastern China Zhenwei Wang Reconfiguring kinship ties: Perspectives of older adults in India navigating late life repartnerships Monika Singh More than home: The collective practice around Finnish summer cottages as a critical element in kinning/de-kinning Erika Takahashi & Outi Jolanki Is age “just a number”? Intimate Relationships Between Older European and Younger Ghanaian Men Apostolos Andrikopoulos International retirement migrants in rural Liguria: an ongoing fieldwork Silvia Stefani, Francesca Lagomarsino & Simone Castellani | Panel 3B: Unfolding Time: Loss and Potentiality in Aging Worlds (Room ADM) Moderators: Natashe L. Dekker & Ida Vandsøe Madsen Refusing to foreclose the future: Narratives of loss, hope and potentiality in Ageing Natashe Lemos Dekker Imaginal worldbuilding Ida Vandsøe Madsen, Nete Schwennesen & Tine Gammeltoft Passing on Intergenerational thriving and caring for life toward its end: Lessons from Kyrgyzstan Maria Louw Anarchic temporality, care and everyday creativity Rasmus Dyring & Lone Grøn “Our Beautiful Ending:” Towards an ecology of care in the face of uncertain futures Anna Corwin Minding the future: articulating possible bordered futures and their dwelling in fear of dementia Shvat Eilat |
| 11.00-11:30 | Coffee Break (Canteen, ALFA building) | |
| 11:30-13:00 | Panel 4A: Growing Old with Animals: Ethnographic Explorations of Human- Animal Relations in Elder Care (Room ADM) Moderator: Tanja Ahlin Ambivalent animals: What to think of robot pets in elder care institutions? Tanja Ahlin Growing old(er) with animals: A multispecies approach to aging studies Nete Schwennesen & Daniel López Gómez Playing cat in the nursing home: pleasure, care work and the relational possibilities of more-than-human intimacy Carla Besora Barti Playfulness and disruptions: pet robots and other animals in a Danish nursing home for people with dementia Simone Anna Felding | Panel 4B: Ageing and Mobility in Africa and in the African Diasporas (Room SCGZ) Moderators: Alessandro Gusman & Marco Gardini Older persons, intergenerational relationships and support in Uganda Valérie Golaz & Claire Médard Intergenerational perspectives on future(s): some thoughts on aging and resettlement among Congolese refugees in Kampala Elisa Armando & Alessandro Gusman The Egyptian communities in Milan: Gendered ideas of aging, homemaking and care at the time of SARS-CoV-2 Marta Scaglioni “Now that I’m retired, I can go on holiday to Ghana.” Aging, social protection and reinterpretation of mobility among the elderly of the Italo-Ghanaian diaspora Serena Scarabello |
| 13:00-14:30 | Lunch break | |
| 14:30-16:00 | Panel 5A: Narrating and Transmitting the Loss. Age and Memory Practices in Forced Migrations (Room ADM) Moderator: Swetlana Torno Understanding experiences of intergenerational memory practices as ruins: existential mobility, narratives, and placemaking among Lebanese diasporas in Montreal Bruno Lefort ‘Memory work’ as ‘care work’? Writing the Mizrahi father Piera Rossetto Ageing and dying in exile: Narratives of Displaced People in Colombia Luis Eduardo Perez Murcia Home-making, memory and intergenerational transmittion of ideas about dwelling Lubica Volanska | Panel 5B: Reimagining Care in Later Life: Relationships, Environments, and Practices (Room SCGZ) Moderator: Sara Bonfanti What’s New? Changing patterns of care practices in transnational Indian families regarding older Adults Shivangi Patel Perceived health and relationship dynamics in later life Srishti Tripathi Images of Care: Reframing media narratives of care in later life Nichole Fernández Environments that enable care and flourishing: exploring the ‘personal projects’ of older adults in Scotland, UK Caroline Pearce Technology caregiving: collectively re-imagining informal networks of care Jacob Sheahan |
| 16:00-16:45 | Coffee break (Canteen, ALFA building) | |
| 16:45-17:30 | Closing plenary (Room ADM) Swetlana Torno, Francesco Diodati & Simone Anna Felding | |
Locations: We have two rooms: Auditorium Danilo Mainardi (ADM) and Sala Conferenza Gabriele Zanetto (SCGZ) both located in the Scientific Campus Via Torino (ALFA Building). Address: Via Torino 155 – 30170 Venezia Mestre – Ground floor and basement.
MAP. We have marked in the programme where each panel/plenary takes place using these abbreviations.
AGENET 