Tactical mediatization and activist ageing: pressures, push-backs, and the story of RECAA

This case study examines the incorporation of digital media technologies and practices into Respecting Elders: Communities Against elder Abuse (RECAA), an organization of activist elders. By studying RECAA’s specific transition and following the work of Michel de Certeau (1988), I distinguish between tactical mediatization and strategic mediatization. Organizations such as RECAA must negotiate with political, ideological, administrative, and economic agendas that exert pressure and provide incentives for organizations “to mediatize” in order to survive in the current Canadian context. ‘Tactical mediatization’ is used to understand RECAA’s very deliberate and considered response to these pressures. This distinction provides a framework for conceptualizing how activist organizations such as RECAA struggle to exert agency within meta-processes that place mounting and insistent pressure on the organization to incorporate digital media technologies into its mandate and system of values

Vulnerable and Vulnerability: Complexities and Conundrums in Discourses About Older People

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Vulnerable and Vulnerability

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Le partage de quels savoirs ? Les articles Wikipédia comme objets-frontières

Wikipédia se présente comme un projet d’encyclopédie collective, un espace auquel chacun peut contribuer dans la mesure où ses principes fondateurs et ses règles sont respectés. Dans cet article, nous réfléchissons à notre intégration et à notre contribution aux communautés éditoriales de Wikipédia. Nous avons modifié et créé une série d’articles Wikipédia reliés à la thématique du vieillissement afin qu’ils incluent les études critiques et culturelles du vieillissement. Le partage en ligne de ce type de connaissances nous semble important, voire nécessaire, puisque ces études restent souvent sous-représentées en dehors des milieux universitaires. Remarquant de telles lacunes dans Wikipédia, nous avons saisi l’occasion de contribuer à ce commun des connaissances et d’étudier les questions de gouvernance qui ont émergé au fil de nos contributions. Au-delà d’un exercice de vulgarisation, notre excursion dans le monde de Wikipédia nous a permis de constater que certaines entrées agissent comme des objets-frontières, des lieux de contestation entre différentes communautés de pratiques. Pour élaborer notre propos, nous nous concentrons sur deux cas, celui du Centre for Women, Ageing and Media dans Wikipédia en anglais et celui de Technologies et vieillissement dans Wikipédia en français.Wikipedia promotes itself as a community that anyone can join as long as they know the rules. In this paper, we reflect on our attempt to join this community and to edit entries on age and ageing so that they include an intersectional perspective. Sharing our knowledge seemed necessary because feminist and ageing studies often stay underrepresented outside the academy. Noticing such gaps in Wikipedia, we decided to contribute to this knowledge common and attend to issues of governance that came up during our interventions. Rather than being a simple exercise in making academic research “vernacular,” our excursion into the world of writing Wikipedia entries reveals how certain entries act as boundary objects, sites of contestation between different communities of practice. We analyze the discussions around the creation of entries for the Centre for Women, Ageing and Media, and for Technologies et vieillissement.Wikipedia se presenta como un proyecto de enciclopedia colectiva, un espacio en el que todos pueden contribuir, siempre y cuando respeten sus principios y reglas fundamentales. En este artículo, las autoras reflexionan sobre la integración y la contribución a las comunidades editoriales de Wikipedia. Para ello se han creado y editado y creado una serie de artículos de Wikipedia relacionados con el envejecimiento desde el punto de vista de los estudios críticos y culturales. El intercambio en línea de este tipo de conocimiento es importante, incluso necesario, ya que, a menudo, estos estudios permanecen subrepresentados en el exterior de la academia. Al notar tales deficiencias en Wikipedia, se aprovechó la oportunidad para contribuir a este conocimiento común y para estudiar los problemas de gobernabilidad que surgieron de dichas contribuciones. Más allá de un ejercicio de divulgación científica, el viaje al mundo de Wikipedia ha permitido observar que algunas entradas actúan como objetos fronterizos y lugares de disputa entre diferentes comunidades. Para realizar dicho objetivo, se analizan dos casos: el del Centre for Women, Ageing and Media, en Wikipedia en inglés, y el de Technologies et vieillissement, en Wikipedia, en francés

Comparative mobilities in an unequal world: researching intersections of gender and generation

Mobilities are shaped by social inequalities and spatial unevenness as demonstrated in a range of existing studies across disciplines. These inequalities are manifest at different scales, from the very local spaces of everyday life to global spaces of accelerated mobilities. Mobile spaces, however distant, are connected through common everyday practices and the sociocultural contexts in which they are produced. In this paper, we argue that researching these interconnectivities and commonalities requires a particular methodological approach that accounts for the situatedness of experience. Our focus is on the ways in which inequalities according to gender and generation are generated through urban designed spaces. We suggest that drawing in to a shared material and ‘border’ object, the urban bench, provides a point of reflection on these distant yet parallel expressions of mobile inequality