Older Women: Active, Connected and Empowered

Challenging the common stereotype of older women as frail, disengaged, marginalized and apolitical, isn’t easy, but Dr. May Chazan is willing to give it her all.

Professor Chazan is among a number of internationally-recognized researchers at Trent who are challenging myths about old age, including an interdisciplinary group of faculty at the new Trent Centre for Aging and Society. As a Canada research chair (CRC) in feminist and gender studies, and a professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, she highlights the many important contributions older women are making in working for social change.

“The CRC position is an amazing opportunity to build a program of research and involve students in it, and Trent is a great place to do this,” said Prof. Chazan. “There’s a really terrific critical mass of feminist scholars here and an interest in aging.”

CRC engages students in cutting edge research

Along with her students, Prof. Chazan’s research explores networks of older women like the Raging Grannies and the Grandmothers Advocacy Network, and examines why and how they are organizing, with a specific interest in how they build solidarities across difference, both overseas and within Canada.

These studies are leading Prof. Chazan and her students deep into the community, where they conduct collaborative feminist research. Together, they document older women activists’ life stories, conduct focus groups to better understand how these women build coalitions, and spend time at gatherings, meetings and protests.

Building solidarities across difference

“I really hope this work will bring visibility to the many important contributions older women are making in working for social change, and that it will bring new understandings to how we might go about building intergenerational solidarities and coalitions across difference,” said Prof. Chazan.

Her past work is equally fascinating, exploring how older women are organizing in response to the massive HIV/AIDS epidemic in southern Africa and the very intricate and unexpected ways they have linked into a large Canadian movement of grandmothers, facilitated through the Stephen Lewis Foundation. This work will be published next spring in The Grandmothers’ Movement: Solidarity and Survival in the Time of AIDS.

Prof. Chazan hopes to collaborate with colleagues at the Trent Centre for Aging and Society in cross-disciplinary studies that will further challenge the way we think about old age. As one of several Canada research chairholders at Trent, she joins some of the worlds most accomplished and promising minds in research that could change the world.