Re-storying Apocalypse: Intergenerational Storytelling on Aging Futures

November 24th 2022 at 2:30-3:30 pm ET 

Watch on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH2NQvfx9CA

Between 2015 and 2019, Dr. Chazan hosted seven intergenerational storytelling and arts-based research workshops in Peterborough (Canada), in Michi Saagiig Anishinaabe territory, co-creating interwoven community stories, media, and art that collectively intervenes in dominant understandings of aging futures. In this talk, May will explore the parallel themes of climate and aging anxiety, both premised on fear of finality, which emerged most explicitly in one such workshop in 2019. May will also screen a short, personal film, called Dream Beautiful Futures, which was created in 2022 in response to what May is learning in this research. The film (5 min) is about May’s own process of aging while parenting a child experiencing intense climate anxiety and eco-grief. Dr. Chazan will draw on decolonial teachings to explore what it could mean to shift from cultural imaginaries of immanent apocalypse to reworlding visions of livable futures. Against a backdrop of upheaval, this research illuminates a collective process of radical imagination in constricted times. It offers conceptual possibilities for aging otherworlds rooted in collectivity, connection to/in place, and intergenerational continuance.

*****

May Chazan is a professor, parent, and activist, who has been living in Michi Saagiig Anishinaabeg territory (Peterborough, Canada) since 2013. May is an associate professor in Gender and Social Justice at Trent University, leads a research program called Aging Activisms, and is an executive member of the Trent Center for Aging and Society. Through intergenerational storytelling and arts-based research, her scholarship aspires toward the expansive work of imagining and making alternative (anti-capitalist, decolonial, crip, queer, just) futures in uncertain times, challenging dominant conceptions of aging, activism, and social change.