Call for Abstracts
In an April 2020 essay entitled “The pandemic is a portal,” Arundhati Roy wrote: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”
Flash forward across the two intervening years—coincidentally, a period that also marks when we last met at an AAGE conference—and we are still on the threshold of that gateway. AAGE 2022 is not directly concerned nor intended to be in conversation with the pandemic. However, just as the pandemic has given us the impetus to re-envision and re-imagine our lives and society, the conference is an opportunity to interrogate where we find ourselves now in terms of aging and the life course, to grapple with the challenges of this new space, and to imagine the possibilities engendered by it.
AAGE 2022 draws our attention to creativity—of ourselves as researchers and of those with whom we work—and the moment’s potential for aging and the life course as a result of that creative engagement. While this orientation tends toward optimism and possibility, it is not naïve; it implores us to situate creativity, to recognize the structures and strictures that often make such creative responses necessary, and to acknowledge the power differentials in how those responses are able to manifest in the world. As we lean into the future, the focus on creativity and aging also reminds us to ground that future in a present and past and to consider the continuities even in the midst of rupture. In this, AAGE 2022 embraces the practical hopefulness of radical change.
AAGE 2022 will take place as a leisurely virtual conference, with an opening weekend July 15-17, sessions on Fridays July 22, August 5, and August 12, and culminating with a closing weekend August 20-21, 2022.
For the conference, we seek abstracts for papers, panels, roundtables, and other creative formats (e.g., film, multimedia, fiction) that explore creativity and aging in its myriad forms. Topics to be explored can include, but are certainly not limited to, creativity in:
- Aging and its representations
- How people approach or understand aging
- Imagining or examining policies or programs that support aging
- Research methods and approaches to studying aging
- Forms of engagement with aging (e.g., fiction, poetry, film, applied research)
- Modes of presentation
- The limits of creativity or creative genres in representing aging
Submitting an Abstract
Please submit abstracts for individual papers or group sessions as a single Word document to aageconference2022@gmail.com. Abstracts are due Friday, April 15, 2022 by midnight Central Standard Time (GMT -6).
Abstracts need to include:
- Submission Type: Individual or Group
- Submission Style: Standard paper presentation, Roundtable, Multi-media event, Interactive workshop, Other
- Title
- Presenter(s)/Author(s)
- Position/Affiliation
- Submission Description (no longer than 250 words)
- Student Submission / Student Involvement (e.g., in a multi-person submission): Yes / No
- Availability for conference dates: July 15-17, July 22, August 5, August 12, August 20-21 [Obviously, July/August is a fair bit away and plans may not yet be set. This is to facilitate our planning. We will do our best to accommodate scheduling needs. We appreciate your assistance!]
For group proposals, please include in a single document a group submission title and abstract (brief description of the joint purpose and format of the session in 250 words), along with the following information for each of the individual presentations: Title, Presenter(s)/Author(s), Submission Description.
Conference Registration
All presenters will need to be currently registered AAGE members. If you are not a member, you will be asked to join AAGE as a condition of acceptance (membership is not a requirement of submitting an abstract, however). For more information on AAGE membership, please visit our website (https://anthropologyandgerontology.com/what-is-aage/).
Conference presenters and attendees will need to register to attend sessions. Registration is $10 and will cover all sessions in the conference. Registration will open Sunday, May 1, 2022.
Presenters and attendees will be able to request financial assistance.