About the Program

It is our great pleasure to invite you to be a part of the Stephen Katz Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Interdisciplinary Aging Studies program; the first of its kind developed by the Trent Centre for Aging & Society (TCAS).

We do so to honour the outstanding intellectual contributions Dr. Katz has made to his discipline and to the creation of our Centre. Prof. Katz helped conceptualize TCAS and put an immense amount of energy into its creation. He remains an active executive member and understands, clearly, the multiple benefits of attracting world-class scholars to Trent University.

To establish and endow this lecture, Trent University has launched a $75,000 fundraising campaign. Dr. Katz and his family have stepped up with a significant financial commitment, but we need your help to ensure the program is robust enough to attract leading researchers to Trent University every year. To contribute to the Stephen Katz Distinguished Visiting Scholar Program, you can learn more here.

Have a look at the video above to learn a little more about the Stephen Katz Distinguished Vising Scholar in Interdisciplinary Aging Studies program. 

If you'd like to support the program, please do. Our students, scholars, and community thank you. We thank you.

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Past Lectures

The Right to a Meaningful Old Age: How integrating arts & culture into health and social services can transform aging

Our visiting scholar, Dr. Anne Basting offered a comprehensive lecture about the power of art in social services and healthcare systems. Dr. Basting shared stories of her work over 2 decades to bring meaning-making techniques into daily care relationships and to aging and health systems as a whole. These include infusing "Beautiful Questions" into meal delivery and senior companion programs, transforming stigmatized nursing homes into cultural centers, and creating student artists in residence programs where arts students receive room and board for a year to live as a neighbor to elders.

On Behalf of the Stephen Katz Visiting Scholar Program and the Trent Centre for Aging & Society, we sincerely thank Dr. Anne Basting for sharing her experience and thoughts with us, and all of those who had the opportunity to attend.

Watch an interview with Dr. Anne Basting and Dr. Stephen Katz on the right to a meaningful old age.

About the speaker: Anne Basting is a writer, artist and advocate for the power of creativity to transform our lives. She is Emerita Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and Founder of the award-winning non-profit TimeSlips.org, which guides, inspires, and supports care systems to infuse creativity and meaning-making into care. Her writing and large-scale public performances have helped shape an international movement to extend creative and meaningful expression from childhood, where it is expected, through to late life, where it has been too long withheld.

Her books include Creative Care: A Revolutionary Approach to Elder and Dementia Care (Harper), Penelope: An Arts-based Odyssey to Transform Eldercare (U of Iowa), and Forget Memory: Creating Better Lives for People with Dementia (Johns Hopkins). Internationally recognized for her speaking and her innovative work, Anne is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and numerous major awards and grants. She believes that creative engagement can and should be infused into every care system and has trained/consulted with Meals on Wheels, libraries, home care companies, senior centers, memory cafes, museums, adult day programs, and every level of long-term care.

Anne is currently at work on multiple projects including EMC2, and effort to sustainably grow the memory cafe infrastructure across the United States.

The Indigenous Elsewhere of Aging: Elder Epistemologies for Decolonial Futures

The 2022 Stephen Katz Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Interdisciplinary Aging Studies was held on Thursday October 6th in the Gathering Space at Trent University. In her public lecture Dr. Sandy Grande (University of Connecticut) reimagined global aging as a site of possibility; as a conceptual opening for rethinking the central dichotomies and contradictions of contemporary society built on the exigencies of capital and settler hegemony: the centrality of work to existence; of economic growth to production; of age to declining yield, and ultimately of life beyond the productivist logics of capital. In so doing, she considered how the lives, knowledge and care of Indigenous Elders help to structure conditions for societal renewal. Her central claim was that Elder epistemologies will become increasingly important as we work collectively to create new possibilities for anti-racist and decolonial futures.

About the speaker

Sandy Grande is a Professor of Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut with affiliations in American Studies, Philosophy, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Across her work, she aims to produce more nuanced analyses of the colonial present. She was recently awarded the Ford Foundation, Senior Fellowship (2019-2020) for a project on Indigenous Elders and aging. Her book, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought was published in a 10th anniversary edition and a Portuguese translation is anticipated to be published in Brazil in 2021. In addition to publishing numerous articles and book chapters, she is a founding member of New York Stands for Standing Rock. As one of their projects, they published the Standing Rock Syllabus. In addition to her academic and organizing work, she has provided eldercare for her parents for over ten years and remains the primary caregiver for her 94-year old father.

Watch the lecture recording here!

Bunions, Brain Games and Belly Fat: Ageing and Algorithmic Media

On October 16, 2019, our third annual Stephen Katz Lecture in Interdisciplinary Aging Studies was held at Trent University. We welcomed Dr. Kim Sawchuck to discuss critical questions about both AI and the algorithms that profile us as we age. Building on the critical work of feminist media study scholars such as Wendy Chun, critical race theorists, such as Safiya Noble and age studies scholars such as Barbara Marshall and Stephen Katz on quantified ageing, this talk explored how ageing operates as a critical lens to reveal differential relations of power in present day mediated/consumer cultures.

About the speaker

Dr. Kim Sawchuk is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University and the director of the SSHRC Partnership Grant, Ageing, Communication, Technologies: Experiencing a Digital World in Later Life (actproject.ca). She holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Mobile Media Studies. Dr. Sawchuk’s research focuses on the intersection between age, ageing, and communication technologies, more recently examining the ways in which Web 3.0 is shaping public knowledge of ageing and old age through community-based research with older adults. Her recent publications include Game-based Learning Across the Lifespan (Springer, 2018) a co-edited collection of articles on collaborative media-making with older adults. View the poster here.

Late Life Homelessness

Our second annual Stephen Katz Lecture in Interdisciplinary Aging Studies welcomed our esteemed guest, Dr. Amanda Grenier. Dr. Grenier discussed the results of her four-year ethnographic study on homelessness in Montreal, Quebec. The Lecture took place on October 10th, 2018 at Bagnani Hall, Traill College, Trent University.

About the speaker: Amanda Grenier is a Professor in the Factor Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto. She is also the Norman and Honey Schipper Chair in Gerontological Social Work and a Senior Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Hospital.

Dr. Grenier has expertise in social and critical gerontology. Her work explores taken-for-granted assumptions about aging, the ways in which concepts are enacted in policy and practice contexts, and how such frames may or may not ‘fit’ with the experiences of marginalized groups. She draws primarily on qualitative research methods including discourse analysis, ethnography, and narrative interviewing. She has conducted funded research on frailty, aging with a disability, and homelessness and aging. In addition to these topics, she has published on transitions and the lifecourse, and conceptual approaches to aging and late life. She has played a key role in national, international and local research networks on aging, and runs the blog International Network for Critical Gerontology. Her current projects include precarious aging and consent among people living with dementia.

The Old King in his Exile

The inaugural lecture was held on October 19th, 2017 at Bagnani Hall, Traill College. We were thrilled to have Dr. Ulla Kriebernegg from Graz University, Austria as the first recipient of this honour. In addition to being an outstanding scholar, Prof. Kriebernegg has enjoyed productive working relationships with several members of TCAS, including Dr. Sally Chivers; both of whom have just released a co-edited monograph called “Care Home Stories: Aging, Disability and Long- Term Residential Care.”

About the speaker: Ulla Kriebernegg is director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care (CIRAC) and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Graz. In her research and teaching she focuses on North American literary and cultural studies, Aging and Care Studies, and Medical Humanities. Her latest book, Putting Age in its Place (forthcoming) deals with the spatiality of care in cultural representations of care homes. Ulla is chair of the Age and Care Research Group Graz and deputy chair of the European Network of Aging Studies (ENAS). She co-edits the Aging Studies book series (Transcript), is Associate Editor of The Gerontologist and member of the GSA’s Humanities, Arts, & Cultural Gerontology Panel. Since 2020, she has been a Fellow of the Trent Centre for Aging & Society, Canada. She directs the Graz part of SSHRC's "Aging in Data" project. Ulla has taught internationally (USA, Trinidad & Tobago, Cuba, Uruguay) and has won several teaching and research awards.