Future events
AGENET Conference 2024
The Age and Generation Network (AGENET) of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) is pleased to announce the AGENET 2024 conference:
Kinning, Moving, and Growing in Later Life
taking place at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, 14-15 March 2024
jointly organized by AGENET and Dr. Piera Rossetto from the Uni’s 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).
See the conference programme here
Past events
AGENET 2023 Webinar Series
24th April, 11:00-13:00 CET webinar on Multimodal Ethnography and Digital Curating in the Research on Ageing and the Life Course
Speakers: Daniel Miller (University College London), Megha Amrith, Victoria Kumala Sakti, Nele Wolter and Alvaro Martinez (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity), and Tomás Sánchez Criado (Open University of Catalonia)
August 24th 10:30-12:00 CET joined webinar with the Socio-Gerontechnology network on Imaginations of Emerging Technology and Data in the Future of Senior Living
Speakers: Mikaela Hellstrand (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Miguel Gomez Hernandez (Monash University), Simone Anna Felding (German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases)
27th September webinar on Aging as a Human Condition and Elderliness in the Absence of the Young in Muslim Kyrgyzstan
Speaker: Maria E. Louw (Aarhus University)
October/November 2023 webinar surrounding the upcoming special issue Ethical Concerns: Envisioning Ethnographic Fieldwork with Cognitively Impaired Older Adults
In collaboration with Barbara Pieta (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology), Cristina Douglas (University of Aberdeen), Matthew Lariviere (University of Bristol) and Maria Vesperi (New College of Florida)
AGENET 2023 Webinar
Multimodal Ethnography and Digital Curating in the Research on Ageing and the Life Course
24th April 2023, on Zoom
The webinar is hosted by Daniel Miller (Anthropology of Smartphone and Smart Ageing, University College London), Megha Amrith, Victoria Sakti, Nele Wolter and Alvaro Martinez (Ageing in a Time of Mobility, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity) and Tomás Criado (Ageing Cities, Open University of Catalonia) as invited speakers and is chaired by Swetlana Torno (AGENET co-convenor, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity).
This webinar focuses on visual and multimodal methods in the research on ageing, generations, and the life course and explores more-than-textual ways of disseminating insights of ethnographic work to academic and wider publics. The webinar will take the form of a roundtable discussion, in which the participants will speak about the interventions of their respective projects in ageing-related topics using collaborative approaches and a variety of media formats. Our goal is to look behind the scenes of multimodal ethnography and to shed light not only on the final output, but also on the creative process of experimenting with audio, visual, digital, multisensorial and interdisciplinary techniques in ethnographic practice and production. The discussion will elaborate on what multimodal ethnography means and will ask the following questions: how do more-than-textual formats transform anthropological research practice? What types of infrastructures are needed in multimodal work? And what challenges did the speakers face while working on their respective projects?
EASA AGENET Slow Online Conference – October/November 2021
Ageing alterities: New horizons for anthropology of ageing and the life-course
In this slow online conference organised by the EASA Age and Generations Network, we will explore new horizons for the anthropology of ageing by reflecting on different forms of intergenerational participation and alternative ways to frame ageing experiences within new social, cultural, political, and technological contexts. We will explore different ways of involving various audiences and a wide range of participants. This will include discussions on anthropological engagement with new methods (visual, sensorial, digital and play!), in and beyond the Covid-19 pandemic.
Two new larger AGENET initiatives will be launched at this conference:
- First will be the formal establishment of our new Ethics Collective. The Ethics Collective of AGENET will hold an interactive workshop to think about how we, as anthropologists of ageing and generations, can collectively address the ethical challenges that we encounter in our ethnographic work with older adults who live with cognitively impaired conditions.
- Second, we will launch the inaugural AGENET/VANEASA/AAGE Award for Best Visual Ethnographic Material related to ageing. Join us to see who will be awarded this year’s prizes and view selected submissions on AGENET website. We hope this award and exhibition will open the debate on how ageing and the life-course can be explored through the emergent and creative methods.
We hope that the series of plenary talks, workshops, exhibitions, and keynotes will provoke more inclusive approaches to ageing imaginaries that evoke the complex assemblages of care, control, relatedness, hope and experimentation within and across generations and the life-course.
