Students participating in a unique project at U of T Scarborough are challenging notions of what it means to grow older.
For the past month, Andrea Charise has led a team of students to curate a digital presentation on aging. Her own research evaluates the intersection of arts and health and how it applies to the aging population.
“My own research has recently been around digital storytelling and how that media form casts new light on what it means to grow old,” says Charise, assistant professor of English and in the Interdisciplinary Centre for Health & Society (ICHS).
The Resemblage Project: A Digital Intergenerational Storytelling Initiative is an online platform curated by six students under Charise’s guidance. The project features students’ interpretations of growing older through the lens of their own experiences and evaluations.
It is one of 20 projects curated through the Jackman Scholars-in-Residence program –– the four-week residency between U of T’s three campuses that hosts upper-year undergraduates in the humanities, fine arts and social sciences.
A total of 13 digital stories from the project are now available as an online resource for readers and educators to access.
For Mia Sanders, a second-year women’s and gender studies student from U of T St. George, the project was an opportunity to theoretically, but also artistically, extend their studies on disability and race.
“I saw age studies as an interesting extension of interrogating this concept of when we ‘other’ older people, it’s one of the few groups who we do this to with the knowledge that we will likely become them,” Sanders says.
Some of the other projects include how children think about aging, measurements of age by memories and experiences rather than years, and perspectives on aging through the lens of race.
Tethered, by neuroscience student Deborah Ocholi, is a letter to her grandmother and explores the idea of who we get our perceptions about aging from, how life events such as immigration play a role in perception and how those experiences are connected throughout families.
Sanders also explored the relationship with their grandmother.
“I was trying to draw the audience into a particular moment in our relationship when I was quite young and we kind of inhabited each other’s worlds in a way that was very visceral and whole.”
Their project, Heartlines, traces how ability, race and queerness played a role in their evolving relationship. Sanders played with sound to “create a sense of immediacy” and paired it with family photos.
Charise explains that one of the ways the project is hoping to broaden the political and social relevance of age is by thinking about aging “as a life course issue.”
“It’s something that should be important to someone in their late teens and early 20s, just as aging is important to someone who is decades older,” she says.
For Iqra Mahmood, a health studies and psychology student from U of T St. George, talking about age studies opens the conversation to factors such as how we spend our money (think about the advertisements targeting young women to prevent aging) and how to separate the number from the person.
“The beauty industry talks about aging as decreasing in beauty,” Mahmood says. “People my age and even younger than me are being targeted for wrinkles and there is a real-life concern to invest money in it.”
Charise explains that the word “resemblage” is a combination of the terms resemblance, assemblage and age. Part of the foundation of the title is the question of how age studies can better resemble the experiences of its learners.
“If we are going to convincingly make age studies a field of a broader social concern, we have to look at all the ways in which aging must resemble, or be made relevant to, the vast range of people that are aging, in Toronto, in Scarborough, and Canada more broadly,” Charise says.