Critical Conversations on Aging Futures

Abstract

In June 2020, I (co-author May Chazan) led a conversation with Tasha Beeds and Jenn Cole—two ongoing contributors to my program of research, Aging Activisms (see www.agingactivisms.org). As Canada Research Chair in Gender and Feminist Studies, critical aging studies scholar at Trent University, and settler of Eastern European Jewish descent living in Michi Saagiig Anishinaabe territory (Peterborough, Canada), I asked the central question: What does it mean to us, from explicitly decolonial, anti-colonial, and/or Indigenous perspectives, to grow old in the twenty-first century? Jenn Cole, mixed-descent Algonquin Anishinaabe-kwe, is a performance studies scholar, acclaimed artist, and Assistant Professor in Gender and Social Justice Studies at Trent University. Tasha Beeds, mixed nêhiyaw, Metis, and Bajan ancestry, is a published poet, prominent Water protector and public intellectual. At the time of writing Tasha is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of Sudbury and the Ron Ianni Fellow at the University of Windsor’s Faculty of Law Indigenous Legal Orders Institute. This conversation among us, as mid-life humanities scholars, sought to extend and complicate dominant narratives and ways of framing aging.