OUR STORIES
OUR STORIES
What has drawn us into working for social change?
How has our activism changed at different times in our lives?
What has sustained us in our work? What forms does our activism currently take?
We take up intergenerational activist storytelling as a research methodology and as a way to bring community activists together across generations and movements to share, receive, and record diverse stories of activisms. Through several different storytelling projects, we focus on the lesser-told and frequently forgotten stories of activisms, engaging especially racialized, Indigenous, LGBTQ2IA+, and older activists. These media projects showcase spunky activists of different ages, backgrounds, genders, and abilities telling their stories in their own words.
Storytelling projects:
youth stories of rewording
Youth Stories of Reworlding was an intergenerational arts-based research workshop held in the spring of 2023, in partnership with the Youth Climate Action Club. Over two days, changemakers ages 10-100 gathered in beautiful Michi Saagiig Anishinaabe territory, at Sadleir House, to imagine beautiful, socially just futures by listening, dreaming, and being creative together.
manifesting resistance
Manifesting Resistance: Conversations about Intergenerational Memory Work across ‘the Americas,’ was a storytelling workshop we held in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough), on Michi Saagiig Anishinaabeg territory. This project was a collaboration between Aging Activisms and Critical MediArtStudio (cMAS, based at Simon Fraser University, led by Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda). As a small group of scholars, artists and activists from across “the Americas,” we recorded our stories about intergenerational memory work, resistance, and creative archive-making.
solidarity weekend
Over three days in the fall of 2017, in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough) on Michi Saagiig Anishinaabe territory, more than 1000 people turned out to denounce white supremacy and to stop a planned neo-nazi rally. Aging Activisms carried out interviews all weekend on the streets, recording people’s perspectives on what was taking place and how this weekend came together. We took these interviews and created three short videos to explore themes and learnings from the mobilization
montreal media capsules
Supported by Ageing + Communication + Technologies (ACT), we co-created a series of media capsules to record our individual histories with activism. In intergenerational groups, we became interviewers, interviewees, and photographers as we shared our stories with each other.
aging radically podcasts
Aging Radically is a community podcast, emerging from two seasons of a show at Trent Radio co-hosted by Maddy Macnab and Melissa Baldwin. Aging Radically amplifies the voices of folks of different ages, genders, and backgrounds working for change and fosters intergenerational dialogue about social justice in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough).