Speaker: Andrea Charise, Health and Society, UTSC Title: “Arts, Wellness, and Crafting Intergenerational Communities”

Talks for Fall 2022: Wednesdays at 10 am (in person at Faculty Club and on ZOOM)

Registration will open a few weeks before the event.

Speaker: Andrea Charise, Health and Society, UTSC
Title: “Arts, Wellness, and Crafting Intergenerational Communities”
Introducer: Maggie Redekop

Abstract:  “Storytelling” is a vital element of arts- and humanities-based health research, education, and practice that involves the sharing of individual experiences of health and illness. Over the past decade, the emergence of digital storytelling has provided another medium for opening important windows into health-related experiences, vastly enhancing the “spreadable” qualities of such stories (to use media scholar Henry Jenkins’ evocative term). Given its typical format of personal and/or collective memories of lived experience as told by one distinct generation to another, intergenerational storytelling—a centuries-old, vitally global phenomenon and practice—is well positioned to benefit from the affordances of the digital realm, as reflected by the emergence of “born digital” intergenerational storytelling initiatives across North America and Europe. Yet, what critical issues might the digitization of intergenerational practices solicit, address, or elide? The second part of this talk offers a critical assessment of the emergence of digital storytelling practices, with a particular focus on their applications as they relate to aging and the intergenerational context. I provide an eclectic, historically-attuned overview of current scholarship in health-related digital storytelling, and discuss one recent community-engaged exemplar: the Toronto-based Canadian initiative The Resemblage Project (www.resemblageproject.ca). The aim of this discussion is to offer 1) a historically sensitive overview of intergenerational storytelling in the digital realm, and, 2) a critical analysis of the conceptual, ethical, and social justice concerns related to its current and future practice.

Bio: Andrea Charise (BASc, MA, PhD) is Associate Professor and Associate Chair-Research in the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research and teaching focuses on the connections between arts, health, and community wellness. In addition to recognition for her work in literary studies (including the John Charles Polanyi Prize), Charise has twenty years’ work experience as a health researcher (primarily in geriatrics, the care of older people). Her research, funded by agencies including SSHRC, CIHR, New Frontiers in Research, and the Connaught Foundation, is published in peer-reviewed venues including Academic Medicine, Journal of Medical Humanities, Advances in Health Science Education, and English Literary History (ELH). She is the author or editor of two recent academic books, including the Routledge Companion to Health Humanities, and The Aesthetics of Senescence (SUNY Press), a finalist for the 2020 British Society for Literature and Science’s Book Prize. She curates The Resemblage Project, an award-winning intergenerational digital storytelling initiative (www.resemblageproject.ca), and is Principal Investigator of “FLOURISH: Community-Engaged Arts as a Method for Social Wellness”, an interdisciplinary research cluster dedicated to advancing creative arts engagement across the lifecourse. Beyond academia, Andrea is a studio-based ceramics artist and an end-of-life doula. (www.andreacharise.ca).

The link to register is https://forms.office.com/r/RAWjiBD4z7

The deadline to register is the Monday before the event at noon. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.