September 27 | Aging Activisms at the "Challenging Barriers of Expression and Promoting Social

September 26-29, there will be a symposium, “Challenging Barriers of Expression and Promoting Social Change: Interdisciplinary Conversations on Power, Activism, and the Academy,” at Traill College in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough). Steering committee member Jenn Cole has been a part of organizing the symposium. On Thursday, September 27th, Aging Activisms will be hosting a panel about methodology and the process of intergenerational digital storytelling in the Stories of Resistance, Resurgence, and Resilience project.

Read more about the Symposium from the organizers:

This symposium is organized by the Impossible Projects Working Group, an interdisciplinary group of emerging and established scholars whose work addresses marginalization and vulnerabilities. The Impossible Projects Working Group shares the dual goals of critiquing social structures that underpin unequal power relations and theorizing the power dynamics created by our own work. The group cuts across humanities and social sciences disciplines, including literature, film, theatre, visual arts, anthropology, oral history, and psychology, and strives to make connections between academics, artists, and activists.

This symposium is a site for interdisciplinary conversations about contemporary and historical power inequalities and the resulting challenges for scholars and practitioners studying and engaging with vulnerable populations and silenced voices. These conversations are particularly important in light of recent political and social developments that have changed both the conditions and the stakes of our research. The rise of anti-intellectual, anti-immigrant, and nationalist sentiment in the US and across Europe is a threat to open and evidence-based decision-making at all levels of society. It is more important than ever, in this climate, to forge new alliances, deepen established research communities, and foster new ones.

In this context, the symposium will explore ways of harnessing our work to produce social change by challenging inequalities and analyzing the complicated relations of power brought into being by efforts to respond to marginalization through academic, artistic, and grassroots practices. It will create opportunities to bridge the gaps between academic research, art, and activism and actively think about how to better communicate the importance of what we do—not only to the public, but to ourselves as academics, across disciplines and with practitioners on the ground. By coming together in a multi-disciplinary setting that reaches across academic boundaries, we hope to forge productive and lasting collaborations across borders, fields, methodologies, and actors.