Theresa Southam is a Doctoral Candidate in Organizational Development and Change, Fielding Graduate University. My doctoral research explores the everyday contributions of 70+ adults in three communities in western Canada. I argue that non-physical contributions are precious, but overlooked, gifts that 70+ adults give to society. These include emotional support, loving thoughts, moment-to-moment awareness, listening, …
How Space and Material Culture Mediate the Life Course I am currently conducting anthropological fieldwork in New York City, studying young adults at the end of higher education as they consider their options for the future. The project is longitudinal, asking how youth culture changes through the transitions between university and work. Shortly before my …
By Rachael Stryker In spring 2010, Tennessee adoptive mother, Torry Ann Hansen, sent her seven-year-old adopted son, Artyom (Justin) Savelyev, back to his native country of Russia with a note that effectively said “Return to Sender.” Her reasons? That the child was “not in his right mind,” “violent,” and “mentally unstable” (Batty 2010). In the …
“This is really starting to get interesting, because I have lots of stories to tell!” exclaimed Bernice (pseudonym), a 95-year-old participant in the newly-launched Upper Peninsula Digital History Initiative (UPDHI) in Hancock, a small town in northern Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. The tension in the air was palpable as the four older adults and four youth …
“They are my daughter’s blood. I couldn’t watch my blood suffer,” an elderly grandmother in Uganda told me. She was referring to her daughter’s four orphaned children, explaining why she refused to allow the children to go live with their father’s clan – the clan that is traditionally responsible for the upbringing of orphaned …
After more than a decade of following how the lives of grandparents and grandchildren – two different generations- in northwest Tanzania have unfolded, it is increasingly exciting to think with the concepts of time and the body. How does time play out in relations with grandchildren as they gradually grow up from toddlers to young …
On Wednesday morning in February 2013, I rang the doorbell of Leena, a 77 years old woman who lived in the city center of Oulu in northern Finland. She had agreed to take me for a walk from her home to the health center. While we were in a lift, Leena expressed her concerns about …
Assigned to write about “futures” in the context of childhood, I find myself dwelling on the past. Although approaches to childhood often must grapple with how “the child” is seen to signify the future (of a family, of a town, of a nation, of humanity), within child welfare systems, which are the context of my …
Futures Past: Absent Kinships and the Japanese Child Welfare System Read More »
This post is part of the Life Course Collaborative Research Network blog exchange, also available on the website of ACYIG. To see all of the posts in the series, click here. In a recent editorial about how our “overdocumented lives” are making it more difficult to let go of the past, Susanna Schrobsdorff writes: Most …
“Time is no longer a river”: Reflections on life, death, and youth in the digital age Read More »
This post is part of the Life Course Collaborative Research Network blog exchange, also available on the website of ACYIG. To see all of the posts in the series, click here. In 2004, as part of my research regarding the beliefs in ‘strigoi’ (a term referring to dead people who come back to harm and …
Growing old and growing up: Teaching and learning about death Read More »
Like most social scientists, my approach to methodology is in important ways entangled with personal narrative. My interest in age as a field of social analysis emerged from my early experiences as a secondary school teacher. As a twenty-three year-old trainee, I was barely older than the more senior teenage students in my charge. At …
Two months before I leave for fieldwork and immerse myself in the daily realities of a small hamlet in Dolomiti di Brenta, northeast Italy, I can only speculate what conceptualizations of old age have emerged and are emerging as a result of wider forces shaping interpersonal connections in the village. What does aging mean …
Putting Linked Lives at the Center of Ethnography Read More »
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