Friends of GSA's Humanities & Arts

12/11/2020

03/08/2019

03/02/2019

Applications are invited at the Department for the Study of Culture in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Southern Denmark in Odense for a Postdoc position in Humanistic Aging Studies to take effect from Juni 1, 2019, or as soon as possible thereafter. The post doc will be...

02/13/2019

“Solitude is necessary to balance things out. But isolation is different. It doesn’t feel like a choice. I don’t want people to see me. There’s this shame for not having much of a life. Everyone else has full lives and families and jobs. So I keep to myself. It’s like there’s a big hole inside of me. And a lot of air. Some days it can be hard to move. Recently I became really malnourished. One morning I woke up with an intense headache, and ended up having a seizure on the floor of my apartment. I spent the next three months at a hospital in Brooklyn. They let me take my wheelchair anywhere. I could explore new floors and meet new people. If anyone needed water, or books from the library— I’d get it for them. My social worker told me that everyone liked having me there. It was the strongest sense of community I’ve ever had. I’ve been depressed since I got home. I want to go back.”

01/26/2019

Centro de Investigación Sociedad y Salud de la Universidad Mayor - Contacto : [email protected]

01/25/2019

Care policy approaches are guided by priorities which decide who gets what kind of care, how much and of what quality. However, unlike in health care, the priority setting in social care is often more implicit. The Transforming Care Conference series will in 2019 put focus on how priorities are made...

01/22/2019

The Department of Global Health & Social Medicine's aim is to confirm King's College London as a world leader in social scientific approaches to health and medicine.

01/18/2019

01/16/2019

Older people are the fastest-growing group of cannabis users, as stigma fades and some seek an alternative to prescription drugs

01/13/2019

Critical Histories of Aging and Later Life (Radical History Review call for proposals)

Critical Histories of Aging and Later Life
Issue number 139
Abstract Deadline: June 1, 2019
Issue editors: Amanda Ciafone, Devin McGeehan Muchmore, and David Serlin
In 2017, the United Nations estimated that the share of the world's population over the age of sixty will have doubled between 2000 and 2050. Politicians, corporate executives, and popular commentators warn of a “crisis” produced by population aging, variously invoking concerns about slowed economic development in the global south, strained pensions and welfare systems, a shrinking labor force, and a care deficit. Concomitantly, academic gerontologists have produced a paradigm of “active” and “successful” aging, conceiving of a physically “healthy,” socially enriched, and economically productive old age that is both a product of, and a solution to, human longevity. These narratives of a “New Old Age” rely upon an overly tidy and teleological account of aging’s history, decrying a simple vision of the bad old days of prejudice and dependency.
The Radical History Review seeks to foster critical perspectives on the histories and politics related to these contemporary understandings of aging and what has been called “later life.” We need radical histories that bring age and aging to the center of analysis and probe the deep past to elucidate antecedents, critiques, and alternative frameworks for making sense of both the “aging crisis” and possibility for thinking about aging and longevity in broader historical perspective. Old age has long bubbled beneath the surface in radical history scholarship: in articulations of kinship and political authority; within transformations of intergenerational relationships wrought by colonialism, industrialization and long histories of migration and settlement; within social welfare and capitalist, socialist, and post/colonial state building; within the ongoing struggles of caring labor and the biopolitical management of life itself; and within the brutal exclusions from old age and infirmity through global systems of inequality and deprivation.
We invite contributions from all time periods and geographies that investigate aging and later life and put them in historical context: as axes for multiscalar and intersectional identities or inequalities, as contested objects of knowledge and governance, as community formations, and sites of cultural and political struggle. We are especially interested in submissions that continue to push the boundaries of aging scholarship beyond Europe, East Asia, and North America, and/or explore histories before the nineteenth century. Such critical approaches would help challenge the narrowly-defined perspectives of the “longevity revolution” among contemporary policy makers and biomedical scientists.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to) histories of:
• Pre-modern and pre-industrial notions of aging, productivity, community, and selfhood
• Labor, consumption, and the lifecycle, wealth and poverty, and political economies of aging
• Aging through the lens of disability history and critical disability studies
• Biopolitics of populations, state formation, and welfare
• Ageism as a racial and colonial project, slow death, and necropolitics
• Death and dying, mourning, and widowhood
• Aging and heteronormativity, gender hierarchy, and eroticism in later life
• Elder activism and historical agency
• Decolonizing aging studies
• Care, kinship, and intergenerational relations
• Aging in relation to globalization and migration
• Archives, oral history, knowledge production, and the age politics of the university
The RHR publishes material in a variety of forms. Potential contributors are encouraged to look at recent issues for examples of both conventional and non-conventional forms of scholarship. We are especially interested in submissions that use images as well as texts and encourage materials with strong visual content. In addition to monographic articles based on archival research, we encourage submissions to our various departments, including:
• Historians at Work (reflective essays by practitioners in academic and non-academic settings that engage with questions of professional practice)
• Teaching Radical History (syllabi and commentary on teaching)
• Public History (essays on historical commemoration and the politics of the past)
• Interviews (proposals for interviews with scholars, activists, and others)
• (Re)Views (review essays on history in all media–print, film, and digital)
• Reflections (Short critical commentaries)
• Forums (debates)
Procedures for submission of articles:
By June 1, 2019, please submit a 1-2 page abstract summarizing the article you wish as an attachment to [email protected] with “Issue 139 Abstract Submission” in the subject line. Please send any images as low-resolution digital files embedded in a Word document along with the text. If chosen for publication, you will need to send high-resolution image files (jpg or TIFF files at a minimum of 300 dpi) and secure permission to reprint all images.
By July 15, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article for peer review. The due date for completed articles will be November 1, 2019. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 139 of the Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in January 2021.
Contact Info:
[email protected]
Contact Email:
[email protected]
URL:
http://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/call-for-papers/critical-histories-of-aging-and-later-life/

*

Critical Histories of Aging and Later Life Critical Histories of Aging and Later LifeIssue number 139 (January 2021)Abstract Deadline: June 1, 2019Co-Edited by Amanda Ciafone, Devin McGeehan Muchmore, and David Serlin In 2017, the United Nations estimated that the share of the world’s population o...

01/10/2019

Oskar Fischer (1876 - 1942) was a German-speaking Czech Jew, a psychiatrist and neuropathologist whose studies on dementia and Alzheimer disease were rediscovered in 2008. The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) College of Sciences established the Oskar Fischer Project last year in his honor. The initiative will engage the world’s brightest minds in a comprehensive literature review with the goal of discovering the cause of Alzheimer’s disease.

Fischer was born in Slaný in central Bohemia in 1876. He attended medical school in both Prague and Strassbourg, returning to the German University in Prague to begin his career in medical science.

Fischer (like Alois Alzheimer) employed new staining and autopsy results, and described "senile plaques" that are still accepted as the characteristic of the disease in addition to "neurofibrillary tangles" discovered by Alzheimer. Both Fischer and Alzheimer argued that senile plaques may be formed by microorganisms. These findings were published in 1907. A second paper was published by him in 1910. But both received scant attention, partly because of the anti-Semitism of the time in academia, and partly because of the competition taking place between the German University of Prague and the University of Munich, regarding who was to be seen as having a better medical research department. Fischer's work was largely "discovered" in 2008 in archives in Prague and brought to the attention of scientists studying Alzheimer's.

Banned from the university after the N**i annexation in March 1939, Fischer started a private practice. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 and brought to Theresienstadt Ghetto, where he was imprisoned in the "Kleine Festung," a notoriously brutal prison set-up for political prisoners that operated somewhat separately from the Jewish ghetto. He died there, officially of a heart attack, in February 1942.

You can click on the link in the comment sections below to learn more.

01/10/2019

01/09/2019

From CBS’s Susan Zirinsky to Glenn Close, many women of a certain age are having a moment.

01/03/2019

We only stop aging when we die. OldSchool.info is a place to raise consciousness and give each of us the tools to play our role in reducing ageism.