ACTPROJECT.CA - Key Persons
Andrea Rosales is a researcher at the Communication Networks & Social Change Research Group (CNSC) at the IN3-Open University of Catalonia (UOC). Her postdoctoral research explores intergenerational differences in the use of mobile communication devices. She is interested in user studies of wearable and playful digital interaction with older people, through ethnographic explorations, participatory action research, participatory design, and prototyping as well as data analysis.
After a Bachelor in Journalism and a Master in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media, she received her PhD in Information and Communication Technologies from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 2014. Her doctoral dissertation explores the designing of wearable and playful accessories to encourage free-play amongst school aged children.
Andrea Tremblay is currently enrolled at Concordia University in the MA in Media Studies. Her areas of special interest, research and investigation are the fields of environmental sustainability education and the influence and power of storytelling as a catalyst for spreading the potential for societal change in this field as well as aging studies. These interests have been fueled by a continuous fascination in the intricacies and subtleties of language in the shaping of individual and collective, local, regional and national identity.
For many years, Andrea has been leading a small business called Language Art Translations that has concerned itself with all manner of English to French translation, from complex monograms to modern marketing content. She believes that language is a foundation for cultural understanding and that cultural shifts and change in norms create new potential for the way to shape education and to create intergenerational interactions.
Andrea holds a BA in French Literature from the University of Montreal and a
Annabelle Arbogast is a doctoral student in Social Gerontology at Miami University. She completed a master's degree in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, where her research examined cultural and biomedical constructions of aging and sexual dysfunction. Annabelle helped coordinate the inaugural conference of the North American Network in Aging Studies at Miami University in 2015, and she currently serves as Secretary and Student Member-at-Large on the NANAS Governing Council. Her research interests include witnessing, language, and embodiment; sexuality and queer aging; and narrative gerontology.
Anneliese Heinisch holds a master's degree from the University of Graz and is currently working on her dissertation on US southern women writers. Her research aims to enter a discussion on approaching and theorizing freakishness and physical deviation in 20th century US southern women's literature. Anneliese's principal research interests lie in intersections of class, gender and identity in literary texts by Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty and Dorothy Allison.
Antonia Hernández is a graphic designer and and SSHRC-supported PhD student in Communication Studies at Concordia University. Mixing media practice and theoretical research, her interests involve the domestic side of digital networks. She is in charge of the graphic design and the website of ACT and its multiple projects.
Ashley McAskill is a Fonds de Recherche du Québec (FQRSC) recipient and a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec. She has a BA in Theatre and Film Studies, and English, and a MA in Communication and New Media from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
Combining her experience in both the disability and theatre communities, McAskill is researching the artistic complexities behind the creative work of Canadian theatre companies working with disabled artists. Her main doctoral project question is how are such companies shifting understandings of disability and theatre making in Canada? Some of the companies included in her PhD research are Theatre Terrific based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Les productions des pieds des mains in Montreal, Quebec, and the performance training program, Les Muses, also located in Montreal. Other research interests include gender and beauty practices, the spectacle of public performativity, feminist media studies, and performance art.
Dr. Crow was appointed Dean of Arts and Science (Queen's University) in July 2017. She is responsible for overseeing the overall operations of the Faculty of Arts and Science, including developing and supporting the Faculty's long- and short-term goals, policies, fundraising efforts, strategic initiatives and academic priorities. Dr. Crow provides leadership to the Associate Deans and Senior Leadership Team of Arts and Science while guiding the Faculty's growth and development. Reporting to the Provost, the Dean ensures that initiatives within the Faculty of Arts and Science are in alignment with the university's strategic goals and objectives.
Dr. Crow's research interests lie in the areas of feminism, aging, and technology, the ways in which they intersect, and specifically the various impacts of digital technology. In addition to her research, Dr. Crow is a co-founder of the Mobile Media Lab and of Wi: A journal of Mobile Media. She is also currently a co-principal investigator on the ACT Project (Ageing, Communication, and Technologies). Learn more about Dr. Crow's research here.
Prior to joining Queen's, Dr. Crow was the Associate Vice-President and Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University. She holds a BAH in Political Science and Women's Studies, and an MA and PhD in sociology.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Sociology at Trent University
Barbara L. Marshall is Professor of Sociology at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada. She has written widely on feminist theory, sexuality and the body, and with her colleague Stephen Katz, has co-authored a series of papers exploring aging, embodiment and sexuality. Her publications have appeared in a range of academic journals and edited collections, including Sexualities, Body and Society, History of the Human Sciences, Sociology of Health and Illness, Men and Masculinities, Medicine Studies, Canadian Review of Sociology, Journal of Aging Studies, Generations, and Science as Culture. In 2006, she was honoured with Trent's Distinguished Research Award. Her most recent book is a co-edited collection (with A. Kampf and A. Peterson), Aging Men, Masculinities and Modern Medicine (Routledge 2013).
She is involved in two collaborative research projects involving other members of the ACT network. "Digital Culture and Quantified Aging" (with co-investigators Stephen Katz and Isabel Petersen, and collaborator Wendy Martin), funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant (2017-2022), explores ways that emerging digital technologies quantify, track and reshape measures of age and ‘success' in aging. "Being Connected @Home", funded by CIHR through the "More Years Better Lives" Joint Programming Initiative (2018-2020) brings together researchers from the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain and Canada (including ACT members Eugene Loos, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Andrea Rosales and Stephen Katz) to investigate contemporary experiences of later life at the intersection of digital infrastructures, place and the experience of ‘being connected'. Other ongoing projects include a critique of the ‘heterosexual imaginary' that frames ‘third age' cultural representations; theoretical explorations that bring together age studies, feminist theory, queer theory and disability studies; and explorations of the intersections of gender and age in coverage of Canada's favourite winter sport - curling!
Barbara Ratzenböck studied sociology at the University of Graz and at Hendrix College, Arkansas. She is a post-doc researcher at the Center for Inter-American Studies of the University of Graz. Her research and teaching focus on sociology of aging, media & technology studies, cultural studies, and Inter-American studies. Barbara has been a member of the ACT Student Committee from 2014 onwards, from 2016 to 2018 serving as the project's Student Advisor. During the spring semester of 2016, Barbara was also a visiting researcher with the Ageing + Communication + Technologies Project at Concordia University. Currently, she is serving as Austrian dataset coordinator of the ACT Cross-National Longitudinal Study: Older Audiences in the Digital Media Environment.
Belinda is a second-year Master's Student in Media Studies at Concordia University. Following a career in animation filmmaking initially in commercial studios and later at the National Film Board of Canada, her interests have migrated to new media production. Her research centers on auteur animation and non-linear narrative structures as a documentary genre for social issues. Belinda holds a B.F.A. in Visual Arts from Concordia. She has worked as a teaching assistant in Intermedia for animation production and as a research assistant for her supervisor, Dr. Matt Soar, in Concordia's Communications department.
Bipasha is currently a Master's student in Media Studies. Her research explores extremism and masculinity within the context of Canadian statehood in online platforms. Some of her passions involve discussion and awareness of a melange of subjects including politics, literature, food, health and psychology.
Brietta O'Leary is a second-year graduate student in the Media Studies M.A. Program at Concordia University, and her work focuses on the representation of gender and bodies in popular culture. Originally from Winnipeg, she has a B.A. in English from the University of Winnipeg. In previous lives, she has been a bookseller and a campus media jill of all trades.
Brooke Clark is pursuing her Master's degree in English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and acts as the Editorial Assistant for Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She presented portions of her honors thesis "(Un)wrapping Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Relational Power and Contagious Wonderment of Candy and Other Things" at the 2015 Wollesen Memorial Graduate Symposium held at the University of Toronto. In May 2015, she also presented her work titled "Power-Aging in Richard III: Endless Withering as Transgressive Authority" at the North American Network in Aging Studies Conference held at Miami University. Brooke's areas of research include Twentieth-Century British Literature, Literary Theory, and Modern and Contemporary Art.
Carly McAskill is a researcher, visual artist, teacher and writer. She is passionate about the arts and culture, intergenerational pedagogies, research-creation, memory studies, motherline research, feminist pedagogy, arts-based methodology, storytelling, disability and age studies. As a visual artist, Carly communicates through intricate mark making using mixed media, drawing, painting and collage. The multi-layered images in her work explore identity through meditation on place, time, presence, and inheritance. Carly believes in the powers of representation through collage: "the fragments are significant as they become a tool to tell a story and reflect a pattern." Also, the use of flowers in her work act as metaphorical subject matter that addresses emotions and issues around memory, history and identity.
Currently, Carly is completing her Doctor of Philosophy in Communication Studies at Concordia University. She is the recipient of the Ageing + Communication + Technologies (ACT) Doctoral Fellowship (2016-present); ACT Scholarship for Graz International Summer School SEGGAU (2016) as well as Faculty of Arts and Social Science Graduate Fellowship in Ethnic Studies and Social Diversity Award (2016) at Concordia University. For the ACT Project, Carly is the financial officer and a researcher for the InterACTion Project. Carly's research uses her art and research background in memory, identity, storytelling, collage, and drawing to lay the foundation for her PhD research-creation project that focuses on making deeper connections to women, mothers, daughters and dementia.
PhD student with WAM. Caroline, a poet and artist, lectures in Drama at the Department of Social Science and Design, Athlone Institute of Technology, Ireland. She previously worked as a social care practitioner with young people in residential care. She holds a Masters in Child and Youth Care and a Postgraduate Diploma in Teaching and Learning. Her research interest is in community engagement and social gerontology, specifically women and ageing, using arts based mediums such as poetry, storytelling, film, drama and art as inquiry tools of discovery. Caroline's WAM PhD will utilise poetry inquiry to explore older women's' perspectives on the social construction of ageing in Irish society.
PhD student with WAM. Caroline has worked as an administrator for a number of years, and has recently returned from a 4-year stint in Malta where she worked as a freelance content writer. Having taken her Masters a few years ago, Caroline has decided to return to the world of academia and is currently exploring representations of women and ageing on screen.
Catherine Middleton, B. A. (Queen's), MBA ( Bond University, Australia), Ph. D. (York). Dr. Middleton held a Canada Research Chair in Communication Technologies in the Information Society from 2007 - 2017. In 2017-2018 she is a MITACS Canadian Science Policy at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC, Canada's communications regulator). She was named to the inaugural cohort of the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists in 2014. Her research focuses on digital inclusion, identifying and assessing policies and practices that enable people to get access to the communications technologies that are central to everyday life. She is also interested in how Canadians use (or don't use) the Internet and mobile devices, and in understanding ways to advance individuals' capacities to use communications technologies to engage in society.
Dr. Middleton's research has been funded by SSHRC, Infrastructure Canada, Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society, Statistics Canada and Ryerson University. Her research projects have investigated the use of ubiquitous communication technologies in organizations, the development of next generation broadband networks (including Australia's National Broadband Network), competition in the Canadian broadband market, and Canadians' Internet use. She was the Principal Investigator for the Community Wireless Infrastructure Research Project, is a member of the Public WiFi in Australia research team and is the Co-Investigator on the Canadian Spectrum Policy Research Project.
Dr. Middleton was a "Big Thinking" speaker in 2010, offering insights to Canadian parliamentarians about what is needed to develop a digital society for all Canadians and gave testimony to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology Study of Broadband and Internet Access Across Canada in 2013. Her 2016 Big Thinking lecture, delivered to the Royal Society of Canada, addressed the challenges of digital inclusion in Canada.
Job Titles:
- Associate Director of ACT
Constance Lafontaine is the Associate Director of ACT and works with the Director to manage the project from Concordia University. As part of her work with ACT, Constance develops and leads participatory action research and research creation projects with Montreal-based partners. She also explores the intersections of animality and human and non-human ageing, including probing multi-species temporalities. Constance is also completing a PhD in Communication Studies at Concordia University, where she focuses on the intersections between discourses of global warming and contemporary animal spectacles, focussing on polar bear displays in Canada. She has completed undergraduate degrees in Communication and Political Science and a Master of Arts in Communication at the University of Ottawa.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of English at Coastal Carolina University
Cynthia Port is Associate Professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. Her research centers on age, value, and temporality in modernist and contemporary fiction and film. Recent work appeared in Occasion and International Journal of Ageing and Later Life (IJAL). Dr. Port is an executive council co-chair of the North American Network in Aging Studies (NANAS) and co-editor of Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Daniel is a PhD student in Political Science at Concordia University, where he holds a doctoral fellowship in aging and social policy. His research focuses on the politics of disability and of aging, specifically in the context of Canadian public policy and social services implementation. His dissertation project compares Canada's provinces by the effectiveness of current policies in promoting social inclusion for older adults with developmental disabilities. Daniel also works as a research assistant on an ongoing SSHRC funded project assessing the generosity of social gerontological policies in twenty post-industrialized countries led by his supervisor Dr. Patrik Marier. In addition to his affiliation with ACT, Daniel is also an active student researcher with the Centre de recherche et d'expertise en gérontologie sociale (CREGÉS) and vieillissements exclusions sociales solidarités (VIES).
Danielle Watson is from Trinidad and Tobago, a twin island Republic in the English Speaking Caribbean. She hold a B.A (hons); Masters of Higher Education (MHEd) Tertiary Teaching and Learning; and a PhD from the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. She has worked closely with the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force, Trinidad and Tobago Police Service, civil society groups and members of vulnerable groups in marginalized communities across the Caribbean.
Danielle recently moved to Fiji where she is a lecturer and the coordinator of the Pacific Policing Programme at the University of the South Pacific. Her research interests are multidisciplinary in scope with a primary focus on police and civilian relations within marginalized communities. She examines police/civilian discourses and policing policy documents. She recently embarked on research examining police and civilian perspectives on crime and criminality; and issues surrounding Community Policing in the Pacific Region with a primary focus on policing vulnerable groups.
David Madden is a soundmaker, artist, scholar and educator. He recently completed a Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Culture (FQRSC) Postdoctoral Fellowship in Music and Sound Studies at the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture, Carleton University, and a PhD in Communication at Concordia University. He conducts research/creation in the areas of sound, ageing studies, electronic/popular music, media and gender, and mobilities. Currently he is undertaking a feminist micro historiography of the specialist players of the Ondes Martenot entitled, Ageing Waves, producing an EP of original musical compositions, making music in Montreal's Underground City, and working on a book on Electroclash (McGill-Queen's). Madden also collaborates with the Participatory Media Cluster and the Mobile Media Lab as an Associate Researcher and previously with TSN 690 (The Sports Network) as an on-air contributor for the program, Game Night Montreal.
Job Titles:
- Video and Performance Artist
Dayna McLeod is a video and performance artist whose work has shown internationally. She is the 2014 recipient of Le Prix Powerhouse, an award presented by La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse that celebrates mid-career women artists who have significantly contributed to the cultural life of Montréal with determination and without compromise. She has received funding for video projects from the Canada Council and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, has won other numerous awards, and often uses remix practices to mashup mainstream culture. Dayna is currently at The Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University pursuing an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Humanities. www.daynarama.com
Dayna's dissertation research examines how over-40 feminist performance artists use the body (their own or bodies-for-hire) within their practices and work in relationship to mass culture and the mainstream backdrop against which their work is always/already positioned. As part of this research, McLeod embarked on a one-year durational performance piece that investigated and lived the stereotypes of a ‘cougar,' a woman over-40 who aggressively demonstrates her sexuality, by wearing nothing but animal print clothing, 24/7.
Dennis Rosenberg, PhD. is a postdoctoral student at the University of Haifa and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He has recently completed his PhD studies at the University of Haifa, Department of Sociology. His main research areas are Internet sociology and sociology of migration. His main domains of interest in Internet sociology are health and Internet/social media use and e-government use. In these domains, he studies ethnic differences in use of Internet for health or e-government. His main domain of interest in sociology of migration is social inclusion of immigrants, including their digital inclusion, marriage and intention to keep on residing in Israel.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Health Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough
Dr. Andrea Charise is Assistant Professor of Health Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Dr. Charise joins UTSC's Health Studies Program from the University of Iowa where she was Postdoctoral Fellow-in-Residence at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies.
Her teaching and research focus on health humanities and humanistic approaches to health studies; English literature, especially the novel and nineteenth-century British writing (the field in which she earned her PhD); old age and age studies; embodiment; critical theory; metaphorics; narrative training for health professionals; and interdisciplinarity. Dr. Charise also holds faculty appointments in the University of Toronto's Graduate Department of English and the Collaborative Graduate Program in Women's Health at the Women's College Research Institute.
In addition to receiving recognition for her teaching and scholarship in literature (most recently, the 2014 Polanyi Prize for Literature), Dr. Charise has more than ten years of work experience as a medical researcher (clinical epidemiology, geriatrics). Her award-winning research is published in a wide range of peer-reviewed venues including Health Expectations, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Academic Medicine, Essays in Romanticism, Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and English Literary History (ELH).
She speaks regularly at conferences in both the humanities and health sciences, in addition to serving on the International Health Humanities Network (IHHN)'s International Advisory Board. She is one of four founding Executive Committee members of the Modern Languages Association (MLA)'s brand new Forum on "Medical Humanities and Health Studies."
Dr. Charise's scholarship has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). She is the recipient of numerous honours and awards, including the John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature (2014), CIHR's AgePlus Prize (2008) and the International Conference on Romanticism‘s Lore Metzger Prize (2011). Her current book-in-progress investigates of the impact of the 19th-century "invention" of population on broader cultural conceptualizations of older age-not only in the historical context of the nineteenth century, but in our own aging-averse moment as well.
Dr. Charise welcomes inquiries from students and colleagues interested in the interdisciplinary conceptualization of health,illness, and aging, especially arts- and humanities-based methods, theory, and creative practices (e.g., literature, film, visual arts). She can be found online at www.andreacharise.com or on Twitter as @AndreaCharise.
Job Titles:
- Principal Investigator
- Associate Professor of Education
Dr. Ann-Louise Davidson is an Associate Professor of Education, Graduate Program Director for the MA in Educational Technology and the Graduate Diploma in Instructional Technology at Concordia University, and holds a Concordia University Research Chair in Maker Culture. She is Associate Director of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology, the Director of the Milieux makerspace initiative and a member of the Participatory Media Cluster. Prior to joining Concordia University, Dr. Davidson served as postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University and she taught in public and private elementary and secondary schools. She holds her degrees from the University of Ottawa.
Dr. Davidson is principal investigator on several SSHRC funded grants that focus on the Potential of the Digital Maker Movement for Authentic Learning and on Engaging Disadvantaged Children in the Maker Movement to Help Them Succeed in a Competitive World. She develops inclusive, interdisciplinary and intergenerational workshop concepts that draw on crucial themes, such as global issues, big data, health, sustainability and youth motivation, through concrete maker activities such as building gaming tables, gamepads, wearable computing, and 3D printers. She also investigates how makers from interdisciplinary fields develop identities as makers.
Job Titles:
- Atwater Library and Computer Centre
Eric Craven is the Community Development Librarian at the Atwater Library and Computer Centre in Montreal, where he also did his graduate studies in Information Science at McGill University. Eric's work focuses specifically on using digital media to disrupt normative expectations and perceptions in the community. Eric has spent the past 6 years coordinator of the Digital Literacy Project to create programming that directly responds to community needs, helping participants learn to express themselves, find new ways to talk about things important to them, and to help them build their own communities with digital tools. Eric has worked with a wide range of academic and community stakeholders bringing diverse groups of people together, ages 6 through 96, to express themselves through digital art and media. Eric has collaborated with members of the ACT community for many years including several community new media projects focusing on seniors and digital music with Dr Line Grenier.
As well as working with communities and digital culture, Eric is also a musician and composer who has been working in the Montreal music scene for the past two decades. You can see him featured in the 2013 documentary And We Made the Room Shine, which follows the adventurous Constellation Records label to the 50th Vienna International Film Festival, and which was part of this year's Viennale.
Erin Gentry Lamb, PhD, is an Assistant Professor and the Chair of Biomedical Humanities, and Director of Hiram College's Center for Literature and Medicine. With a Ph.D. in English from Duke University, her teaching and scholarship are grounded in rhetorical analysis and feminist bioethics approaches, with particular interests in the social and ethical consequences of anti-aging consumer culture and medicine and emerging genetic and other enhancement technologies, as well as the pedagogy of health humanities and age studies at the undergraduate level. Her scholarly work appears in such publications as The Journal of Medical Humanities, The Health and Humanities Reader, The International Journal of Aging and Society, and Age, Culture, Humanities. A founding member of the North American Network in Aging Studies, she has previously chaired the Executive Council of the MLA's Age Studies Discussion Group and the NWSA's Aging and Ageism Caucus, and she serves on the editorial board of the Aging Studies in Europe book series and the Editorial Committee of Age, Culture, Humanities.
Prof. dr. Eugène Loos (born in 1963 in Herwijnen, the Netherlands) is a Professor of Old and New Media in an Ageing Society in the Department of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam. He is also a Senior Lecturer of Communication, Policy and Management Studies at the Utrecht School of Governance (USG), Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He is a member of the Dutch research schools ASCoR (Amsterdam School of Communication Research) and the Netherlands Institute of Government (NIG). As a linguist, he has conducted research and written several books, book chapters and journal articles in the field of organizational (intercultural) organization and the use of new media.
Currently he investigates the (ir)relevance of age for: (1) senior citizens' digital information search behaviour, (2) their identification with images, (3) the impact of visual and textual signs in digital health information on their cognition and affection, (4) the use of digital (sport) games for their physical, mental and social wellbeing, and (5) intergenerational digital gaming for their societal inclusion.
He is an international expert on inclusive website design and encouraging online participation in the face of a range of physical and life stage challenges. His extensive contribution to the field of accessible (digital) information delivery for senior citizens include Generational Use of New Media (published by Ashgate August 2012, co-edited by Haddon and Mante-Meijer),New Media Technologies and User Empowerment (Peter Lang 2011, co-edited by Pierson and Mante-Meijer) and The Social Dynamics of Information and Communication Technology (Ashgate 2008, co-edited by Haddon and Mante-Meijer).He also published several chapters and other refereed (inter)national publications.
In July 2017 he launched the Intergenerational Gaming Platform. More information about this Platform and the bi-annual IGP Newsletter? Please send an email to: e.f.loos@uu.nl
Job Titles:
- Fellow at the Mobile Media Lab
Evan Light is an FRQSC postdoctoral fellow at the Mobile Media Lab, Concordia University. A former IT professional, his current research concerns the ownership and control of telecomunications networks, privacy and surveillance. Evan is also an associated researcher with the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la communication, l'information et le société and a member of the Canadian National Organization to the International Telecommunications Union. His work has appeared in publications including the Canadian Journal of Communication, Commons: Comunicación y Ciudadanía Digital and the Latin American Journal of Communication Research. Evan is also the creator of the Portable Snowden Surveillance Archive, an device for enabling off-line research on surveillance. As the ACT expert in networks and privacy, he is charged designing and maintaining secure systems for research collaboration and data storage.
Francesca Belotti earned a Ph.D. in Political Languages and Communication at Sapienza, University of Rome (Italy). She was AMIDILA Postdoctoral Fellow at the National University of Misiones (Argentina) and, later, was CONICET Postdoctoral Fellow at the National University of Quilmes (Argentina). Currently, she is Postdoctoral Fellow at the LUMSA University of Rome (Italy) where she investigates ageist and sexist stereotypes related to social media. Indeed, her research interests deal with: grassroots movements' media practices; older people's media practices and ageist ICT-related stereotypes; women's rights and sexism; commons and human rights. Hitherto, she approached ageing, communication, and technology in two ACT-related research projects. First, "Mobile Communication and Over-60"1 analyzing the usage of mobile phones by Italian older individuals in their daily lives and comparing results to those gathered in Europe, North and South America. And second, "Ageism and social media through the lens of the media ideologies: an exploratory research"2 unveiling ageist (self-)stereotypes and discriminatory attitudes towards older people within a wider reflection around digital platform usage practices, and the social norms that dictate the appropriate ways of using them.
Gabrielle Lavenir is a second year PhD student in Concordia's Social and Cultural Analysis program. Her research focuses on older adults who play videogames and on the figure of the « silver gamer ». She observes what happens at the intersection of ageing and play, particularly in terms of subjectification and normativity. She also look at the strategies of older adults who, stuck in the middle of those normative enterprises, still manage to make room for games.
Gabrielle Lavenir hold a master in sociology from Sciences Po Paris. She is a member of the Observatoire des Mondes Numériques en Sciences Humaines (Paris) and the TAG lab at Concordia.
Job Titles:
- Concordia University Communication Advisor
Job Titles:
- Principal Investigator of the ACT
- Professor
Dr. Fannie Valois-Nadeau is a postdoctoral researcher co-supervised by Professor Kim Sawchuk at Concordia University and Professor Samantha King at Queen's University. Her postdoctoral research explores the articulations between active ageing discourses, the culture of philanthropy and "retromarketing" practices within the Canadiens Alumni Association. Her work is part of a critical reflection about ageing in public and the political context of ageing in Quebec. Her research interests are situated in cultural studies, memory studies, ageing studies and sport studies. She is currently student rep for the ACT network.
After a MA and a BA in Sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Dr. Fannie Valois-Nadeau has completed her PhD in the Joint Program in Communication at Université de Montréal (UdM). Under the supervision of Dr. Line Grenier, her doctoral dissertation explores the centennial anniversary of the Montreal Canadien hockey team and proposes a communicational approach to "doing memory". This project has brought into light the valorization of intergenerational relations in the Montreal Canadien discourse and produces a critical reflection on its commodification and its political implication.
As a research assistant, Fannie Valois-Nadeau participated the collaborative ethnography regarding the musical contest "Étoile des Aînés" directed by Dr. Line Grenier. The article "‘Vous êtes tous des gagnants.' ‘Étoile des aînés' et le vieillissement réussi au Québec" is the first to have come out of this collaboration.
In addition to her participation in the ACT network, she is also member of the Lab Culture Populaire Connaissance Critique (CPCC) and of the King research group.
Kim Sawchuk, Principal Investigator of the ACT team, is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University and the Concordia University Research Chair in Mobile Media Studies. Sawchuk has been writing on age, ageing and its cultural impact since 1996. She is most well-known for her research on "seniors and cell phones" conducted with Dr Barbara Crow of York University as well her research-creation work in Critical Disability Studies. Sawchuk is a co-founder of the Mobile Media Lab (York-Concordia) located in Concordia's Department of Communication Studies. She has just completed a six-year term as the editor of the Canadian Journal of Communications (www.cjc-online.ca) and she is the co-editor of Wi: journal of mobile media (www.wi-not.ca). In addition to her academic research, in 1996 Sawchuk co-founded of StudioXX, a feminist research and media arts centre in Montréal.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Associate Professor at the Département
Line Grenier is Associate Professor at the Département de communication at Université de Montréal in Montréal, Québec (Canada), and leads the Critical Mediations stream of ACT. Director of the research group Popular Culture, Knowledge and Critique (CPCC), she teaches predominantly in the areas of research methodologies, media theory, memory and media, and popular culture. A popular music studies scholar, her work on the history and politics of "chanson", local music industries, broadcasting and cultural policies related to French-language vocal music, rites and processes of popularization and valorization in Québec, the Céline Dion phenomenon and the figures of fame and celebrity it embodies, as well as the business and politics of live music, especially on the role of small venues in Montreal, has been published in several journals, including Popular Music, Cultural Studies, Recherches féministes, Ethnomusicology, Recherches sociographiques, and Musicultures. Her research interests have recently focused on the intersections of ageing and music, and the cultures of ageing that take shape therein. Grenier has taken part in a team ethnography of a music contest for seniors, which examines the entanglements of musicking, ageing, and memory. She has studied discourses and public policies on "active ageing" in Québec, and the ways in which they inform how ageing is performed at different music events featuring older adults. Through an ongoing collaboration with a community partner, Grenier contributes to digital music workshops designed to explore, among other issues, how ‘old' and ‘new' technologies mediate music practices, and how music is experienced differently, throughout the life course. After having co-lead a participatory pilot project on ageing, deafhood and technologies, she is currently working with the same colleague on "deaf musics". This pilot project aims at better understanding how ageing Deaf people access and experience music as a cultural practice today, and how they did so in the past.
Job Titles:
- Community Partner Representative
Job Titles:
- Senior Researcher at the IN3
Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol is a senior researcher at the IN3, the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (UOC, Open University of Catalonia) where she serves as Co-director of the Research Group "Communication Networks and Social Change ".
Her main research interest is the analysis of the socio-economic effects of the (mobile) digital communication in our hyper-connected societies. Her interests are set both in developed and in developing countries. In the area of mobile communication and ageing, projects include "A-C-M: Ageing and Mobile Technologies: research methodologies, systemic biases and access to Communications" (2011-2014, SSHRC ref. 890-2010-0138), "Ageism: A multi-national, interdisciplinary perspective" (2014-2018, ref. COST Action IS1402), and "BCONNECT@HOME: Being Connected" at Home - Making use of digital devices in later life" (2018-2021, ref. PCIN-2017-080). Her publications include articles in high-impact journals (New Media & Society, Media, Culture & Society, or Nordicom Review) and books or book chapters in prestigious publishers (Routledge or MIT press), some of them co-authored with members of the ACT project.
Sébastien Libert is a PhD student from University College London, working on ageing, dementia and current technologies as part of the INDUCT (Interdisciplinary Network for Dementia Using Current Technologies), European research network. He completed a Bachelor at ULB (Belgium), and a Master at KUL (Belgium) and University of Copenhagen (Denmark) in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology.
His PhD explores the way in which comprehensions of successful, and failed ageing are culturally constructed inside western imaginaries of later life, and come to influence 1) our understanding of cognitive decline and dementia, and 2) the use and development of new technologies relating to these conditions.