NANAS Elections 2019/20

NANAS is seeking to elect two members-at-large to its Governing Council for a 3-year term.

The Candidates: 

Kate de Medeiros  (Miami University, OH)

Kate de Medeiros (O’Toole Professor Gerontology), received her PhD in gerontology from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2006. Her research interests are concerned with cultural structures affecting the experience of aging and the construction of self such as autobiographical writing, as well as personhood in people with dementia. In 2008, de Medeiros received one of only four Brookdale Leadership in Aging Research. Her research has also been funded by the Alzheimer’s Association and the National Institute of Aging. In addition to numerous research articles, she recently published Narrative Gerontology in Research and Practice.

Recent Publications:

Swinnen A., de Medeiros K. (2017). “Play” and People Living with Dementia: A Humanities-Based Inquiry of TimeSlips and the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project. The Gerontologist. 00(00): 1-9. Advanced access publication available online on January 18, 2017. DOI: 10.1093/geront/gnw196.

de Medeiros K (2016). The Short Guide to Gerontology. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. (241 pages)

de Medeiros K, Rubinstein R. (2016). Depression and the performance of masculinity in a military retirement community. Men and Masculinities. 19(2_: 148-166. DOI: 1097184X15606932.

de Medeiros K, Rubinstein R. (2015). “Shadow stories” in oral interviews: Narrative care through careful listening. Journal of Aging Studies. Published online on March 14, 2015. Doi:10.1016/j.jaging.2015.02.009.

Rubinstein R, de Medeiros K. (2015). Successful aging, Gerontological theory, and neoliberalism: A qualitative critique. The Gerontologist. Published online on August 26, 2014.  DOI: 10.1093/geront/gnu080.

de Medeiros K (2014). Narrative Gerontology in Research and Practice. New York: Spring Publishing. (256 pages)

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 Marlene Goldman (University of Toronto)

Dr. Marlene Goldman is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. She specializes in contemporary Canadian literature. Her recent research focuses on the intersection between narrative and pathological modes of forgetting associated with trauma, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease. She is the author of Paths of Desire (University of Toronto Press, 1997), a book on apocalyptic discourse in Canadian fiction, Rewriting Apocalypse (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2005), and (Dis)Possession (forthcoming McGill-Queen’s Press 2011). Currently, she is writing a book entitled Forgotten: Age-Related Dementia and Alzheimer’s in Canadian Literature. Dr. Marlene Goldman was awarded the Canadian National Institute for the Blind’s Barbara Tuck-MacPhee Award in 2018.

Teaching and Research Interests
Contemporary Canadian Literature; Medical Humanities; Age Studies; Models of Mind and Consciousness, Pathological Memory Loss: Trauma and Age-Related Dementia; Canadian Diasporic and Immigrant Literature; Gothic; Women’s Writing; and Native North American Literature

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 Julia Henderson (Concordia University)

My name is Julia Henderson and I am delighted to stand for election as a member-at-large of NANAS. Currently, I am a SSHRC-funded Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Communication Studies and with the Ageing+Communication+Technology (ACT) Project at Concordia University. After participating in AgingGraz 2017 and Trent Aging 2019, andmeeting the exciting international community of Age Studies scholars there, I am keen to serve on the NANAS governing council and contribute my energy to developing the field in North America. In terms of my research interests, I am currently working with Dr. Kim Sawchuk and employing a community-engaged, creative arts intervention involving persons with dementia and their caregivers in developing and participating in performance that re-imagines dementia tragedy narratives and interrogates the concept of ‘assistance’. I have a background as both a professional actor and an occupational therapist and continue to work in both fields. My doctorate, which I completed in Theatre Studies at the University of British Columbia in 2018, investigated ways in which select Western plays challenge negative, decline-focused narratives of aging and old age, as well as denaturalize other age stereotypes and troublesome narrative tropes. My work has been published in Age, Culture, Humanities; Theatre Journal, Theatre Research in Canada, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performanceand is upcoming in The Thornton Wilder Journal. In addition to my own research, I have contributed to the field of Age Studies in a number of other ways. I am a member of UBC’s Interdisciplinary Re-imagine Aging Research Cluster, its Medical and Health Humanities Working Group, its Arts in Health Community of Practice, and its Centre for Research on Personhood in Dementia. I am also a consultant on the Vancouver Foundation-funded project Raising the Curtain on the Lived Experience of Dementia. In 2016-2017 I served on the Canadian Association for Theatre Research [CATR]’s Emerging Scholars Task Force and was able to contribute an age studies perspective. I also sat on the 2019 NANAS Student Award Committee. With Benjamin Gillespie, I co-chair a three-year CATR-sponsored Working Group titled “Age and Performance: Expanding Intersectionality,” now in its final year. We, along with Nuria Casado Gual, will co-edit an upcoming special issue of Theatre Research in Canada—this journal’s first on age and performance. In 2017, I also coordinated and chaired the symposium Aging: Acts of Memory and Forgetting hosted by UBC’s Department of Theatre and Film, co-sponsored by ACT, and featuring visiting scholar Dr. Josephine Dolan. I am excited and grateful to be part of the growing field of age studies and I would be honoured to serve on the NANAS governing council. I am particularly interested in working on ways to attract and involve emerging scholars, in representing and promoting Aging Studies within theatre and performance disciplines and among arts-based health care researchers, in seeking and expanding avenues for our work to influence public policy, in planning conferences and other events to advance the field, and in exploring ways to expand Age Studies online communities.

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 Sara Jamieson (Carleton University) 

Sara Jamieson is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University. Her research is broadly focused on representations of aging and later life in contemporary Canadian literature, and includes publications on the work of Alice Munro, Carol Shields, Joan Barfoot, and Paul Quarrington. She is currently at work on a project on constructions of midlife in Canadian literature and culture. Her research is focused on how fictional texts engage with conceptions of “successful” aging currently circulating in popular culture, as well as the literary modes and narrative forms they utilize to represent aging subjectivities in the context memory and language loss. She is particularly interested in fictional texts that explore the spatial and social complexities of life in residential care facilities. Her recent research traces a shift away from fictional depictions institutional life as something to be avoided or escaped at all costs, to a new willingness to explore how the disadvantages of the institution might be mitigated and a habitable existence sustained within its walls. Mirroring the recent proliferation of housing options available, particularly to affluent seniors, as well as a gerontological shift away from an emphasis on the depersonalizing aspects of the old age home as a “total institution,” such literary representations participate in a wider cultural and political dialogue about end-of-life care.

Recent Publications

“Picturing Midlife: Aging and the Limits of Narrative in Carol Shields’ Larry’s Party.” Forthcoming in Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 4, 2019.

“Ethics and Infant Feeding in Alice Munro’s Stories.” Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro. Edited by Amelia DeFalco and Lorraine York, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018. 13-33.

“Alice Munro and the Memorized Poem.” Alice Munro’s Miraculous Art: Critical Essays. Ed. Janice Fiamengo and Gerald Lynch. University of Ottawa Press, 2017. 79-95.

“Reading the ‘St. Louis Whirligig’: Hockey, Masculinity, and Aging in Paul Quarrington’s King LearyJournal of Canadian Studies 48.3 (2014): 181-199.

“Reading the Spaces of Age in Alice Munro’s ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 47.3 2014. 1-17.

 

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 Annette Leibing (University of Montréal)

Annette Leibing is a medical anthropologist (PhD U Hamburg), who had her first academic position at the department of psychiatry at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. There she founded and directed the CDA, a multidisciplinary centre for mental health and aging, with a special focus on dementia. After a postdoctoral fellowship with Margaret Lock, at McGill University, funded by a Guggenheim scholarship, she is now full professor at the Nursing faculty at the Université de Montréal, and member of several research groups. Her research focuses on issues related to aging, by studying – as an anthropologist – Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s in different contexts, aging and psychiatry, pharmaceuticals, elder care and, stem cells for the body in decline, among others.

At the moment, her main research topic is the prevention of dementia in different national and social contexts (Canada, Brazil, Germany, Israel) – a topic that recently resulted in 2 workshops (one in Göttingen, another in Montreal) and about which an edited volume will soon come out (see below). In fact, this research not only shows that considering context and the way aging-related research is being framed, is important, but also that often individualized public health recommendations are profoundly social and linked to social justice.

Recent Publications

Leibing, A. – The earlier the better – Alzheimer’s prevention, early detection, and the quest for pharmacological interventions. Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry38(2): 217-236, 2014.

Leibing, A., Guberman, N & J Wiles – Liminal homes: Older people, loss of capacities, and the present future of living spaces. Journal of Aging Studies37(1): 10-19, 2015.

Leibing, A. – Dementia in the making: Early detection and the body/brain in Alzheimer’s disease. In: Popularizing Dementia, Public Expressions and Representations of Forgetfulness,Aagje Swinnen and Mark Schweda (eds.). Bielefeld: Transkript,pp. 275-294, 2015.

Leibing, A., Tournay V, Aisengart Menezes R & RF Zorzanelli – How to fix a broken heart: Cardiac disease and the ‘multiverse’ of stem cell research in Canada. BioSocieties11(4): 435–457, 2016

Leibing, A. – On short cuts – the complexity of studying the early diagnosis and prevention of Alzheimer’s disease. In: ‘Emerging Technologies for Diagnosing Alzheimer’s Disease. Innovating with care’.M. Boening, H. van Lente, et E. Moors (eds.), Palgrave, p. 41-62, 2016.

Leibing, A. – Alzheimer’s disease in urban Brazil. In: The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology.Lenore Mandersen, Elizabeth Cartwright, and Anita Hardon (eds.)., Routledge, 2016, pp.193-197.

Leibing, A. – Successful Selves? Heroic tales of Alzheimer’s Disease and Personhood in Brazil. In: Successful Aging? Global Perspectives on a Contemporary Obsession, Sarah Lamb (ed.). Rutgers University Press, 2017, pp. 203-217.

Leibing, A. – Situated Prevention: Framing the ‘New Dementia’, Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics46 (2018): 704-716. DOI: 10.1177/1073110518804232

Leibing, A. and Natashe Lemos Dekker – organization of spccial issue “Fallacies of care – when meaning well does harm”. Journal Aging Studiesonline first publication, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2019.100795, 2019.

Leibing, A. and S. Schicktanz (eds.). Preventing Dementia? Critical perspectives on a new paradigm of preparing for old age. New York/Oxford, UK: Berghahn, accepted.

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