Paper short abstract:

How can documentary filmmaking become research practice when the lens is focused on the everyday life of those living through old age? In this presentation, I discuss the process of filming and editing Half Elf (2020), a feature length documentary film, I made about my aging grandparents.

Paper long abstract:

An obsession with youth in mainstream western culture has left those living through old age feeling

somewhat neglected. The last stages of the life course are underrepresented in Icelandic society at large. As people get older images of them fade from sight on our screens and their voices start to disappear from the airwaves. In this presentation, I look at how documentary filmmaking becomes research practice when the lens is focused on the everyday life of an elderly couple. Further, I will explore how an ethical approach to fieldwork and editing techniques are affected when working with those familiar to us. My case study is Half Elf (2020), my feature length documentary film made during the Masters in Visual Anthropology program at Freie Universitat in Berlin. The film is about my grandparents, Hulda and Trausti, who have shared a roof on Icelandic shores for over seventy years. As his one hundredth birthday nears Trausti begins searching for a coffin and tells his wife that he wants to change his name to "Elf". Hulda warns him that if he does this his family will abandon him and she retreats into a world of poetry with the help of an electric magnifying glass. The process of filming this story, editing a narrative and raising funds to bring the film to a wide audience were all fraught with familial difficulties. I needed to navigate these obstacles and use the problems they presented to support the filmmaking and deepen the research.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the experiences of ethnographers working within multidisciplinary teams of clinicians, designers and engineers on the co-design and iterative development of digital platforms and visual content with and for community dwelling older adults.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the experiences of ethnographers working within multidisciplinary teams of clinicians, designers and engineers on the co-design and iterative development of digital platforms and visual content with and for community dwelling older adults. Using examples from 1) the TRIL Building Bridges Project for social engagement, 2) a self-management and peer support system for COPD sufferers and 3) the IDS-TILDA website on ageing and intellectual disability, this talk will consider opportunities, challenges, power asymmetries, decision-making, and ethical dilemmas involved when incorporating ethnographic methods within design processes.

Paper short abstract:

In a Lisbon senior day center, the staff and elderly members care for each other in ways that challenge active aging campaigns. With visual media, they illuminate the ways in which communal care produces a process of intersubjective self-making through reflections on friendship, loss, and mortality.

Paper long abstract:

"Ah, Maria do Céu!" Sónia exclaimed. Projected onto Lisbon's Santos-o-Velho Day Center's blank wall was a homemade film by the Center staff. Maria do Céu had died a couple years prior. Sónia continued, "that'll be us next."

In this paper, I show how intimate relationships built on communal care are integral to the everyday life at the Center, and that the use of visual media by staff and elderly members complicates and deepens the significance of communal care. The act of filming and photographing daily life and events (to keep an active archive of the Center's activities and goings on, and to refresh the members' memories) at the Center allows for an intersubjective self-making. Confronted communally with images of the self and of each other, the members and staff reflect on their relationships to each other, to care, to loss, and to their own mortality.

Watching themselves care for each other serves to refract moments of daily life, rendering visible the nuances, ambiguities, and the depth of communal care in the Center. This allows for an intersubjective notion of a "good life" different than the one imagined by the state, and circumvents the neoliberal ideal of the "good life" inscribed in "active" and autonomous aging campaigns. Communal care, especially among the elderly themselves, allows us to consider new ways of flourishing in old age, while reconfiguring care, everyday intimacy, and visual methods used by our own interlocutors (Mattingly 2014).

Keywords: Aging, care, communal, visual media, intersubjectivity, loss, mortality.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that visual communication through the smartphone application LINE is facilitating affective informal care between children and their elderly parents. Based on ethnographic research on digital health and self-care practices among older people in Kyoto and Kochi, Japan.

Paper long abstract:

As older people increasingly adopt the smartphone in Japan, digital visual communication through LINE stickers is facilitating affective informal care between children and their elderly parents. This paper draws on long-term (Feb 2018 - June 2019) ethnographic research on everyday digital health and self-care practices among older people in Kyoto and Kochi, Japan. With families living dispersed across Japan, sending messages and photos via social media, including the messaging application LINE, has become an important part of kin relations and has created a digital affective space. Forms of care at a distance are practiced through the exchange of messages, photos, emojis and stickers (illustrated messages), and also through video calling, allowing people to demonstrate care and convey feelings while maintaining privacy and reducing burden. Aided by participatory drawing elicitation techniques, the research on which this paper is based examined the affective nature of care at a distance through visual methods. Previous work on affectivity, technology, and care in Japan has focused on the possibilities of robots which are designed to elicit a caring and therefore therapeutic response in the user because of their outward appearance and tactility, such as Pepper (White 2018), or Paro the seal (Dumouchel 2017). Meanwhile the capacity for technologies to convey affect between users, in conjunction with their imaginations, has been less explored. Understanding caring in the digital age is critical given the challenges for care posed by Japan's ageing population, and Japan's turn towards technology to cope with a decreasing health and care workforce.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the possibilities and limitations of multimedia based ethnographies going beyond synoptic illusions involving the cultural context of late life. It examines this through a video ethnography of community gardens in New York City and a multimedia enabled ethnography set in Mexico.

Paper long abstract:

With the meme "O.K. Boomer" penetrating the social media worlds of old and young alike it provoked me to explore how multimedia ethnography might broach this dilemma of synoptic illusions. As perceived by Pierre Bourdieu, "synoptic illusions," condense a great deal of actual heterogeneity with simple, ideal statements that stand in for a more complex whole. In exploring late life, I examines in two projects the extent to which multimedia data, visual and otherwise, can work with ethnographic text to supersede the synoptic limitations of either the written word or video presented by themselves in trying to represent cultural reality.

Here I rethink two long-term ethnographic projects which explore the roles of older adults in changing social landscapes. One is a decade in the making video ethnography focusing on community gardens in New York City and another comprises a multimedia-enabled ethnographic book trying to encompass over four decades of change and the impact of globalization in a Mexican Indigenous community. In making the multimedia materials available to the subject communities I will discuss how varied and sometimes very conflicted reactions to these materials illuminate the underlying complexity of elder persons in changing cultural contexts.

These efforts will be counterposed with the advantages of exciting new projects such as the interactive transmedia project "Elderscapes: Ageing in Urban South Asia and the multisited ASSA Project - Anthropology of Smart Phones and Smart Aging, working in a collaborative, social-media-enabled framework.

Paper short abstract:

Based on 16 months ethnographic research amongst older adults and migrant groups in Milan, I will reflect on the potentials and challenges of the smartphone in/for the anthropology of the life course, advocating overall for an onlife approach to smartphones and ageing.

Paper long abstract:

Digital technologies provide significant scope for the anthropology of ageing and the life course. In this paper, I explore the research potentials and challenges of the smartphone specifically, showing how it illuminates the study of the life course in a number of compelling visual and digital ways. As object-method, the smartphone reveals what people do; how they pass their time and with whom; how they traverse public/private domains; and how they view and narrate their own lives - from WhatsApp chats, to photo-sharing, to Facebook groups, to apps downloaded, used and discarded. Meanwhile, through their own digital and visual research entanglements, the anthropologist's 'field' is collapsed into her phone, and people and places remain present on the screen beyond fieldwork, blurring a number of spatial, social and epistemological boundaries.

Based on ethnographic research amongst older adults and migrant groups in Milan as part of the ASSA (Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing) project, the paper suggests how smartphones illuminate the present and future study of the life course, with an emphasis on digital and visual practices. Moreover, in moving beyond online/offline dichotomies with smartphones, the 'onlife' (Gomez Cruz 2017) I suggest, has greater applicability in this context; in acknowledging both the habitual interrelating of these categories in people's everyday life, and the anthropologist's entanglement of their own life with the peoples whom we live and work amongst in a myriad of forms and settings.

Paper short abstract:

Based on research with elderly people from Indian transnational families and on young migrants from Malaysia, we argue that (visual) digital technologies actively shape the practice of fieldwork and co-create 'field-events' together with ethnographers and their study participants.

Paper long abstract:

What becomes of 'the field site' when fieldwork is conducted with the help of (visual) digital technologies? Based on fieldwork on elder care in Indian transnational families and young Chinese migrants from Malaysia, we suggest that such technologies are more than just tools which can be used to facilitate research. Drawing on the material semiotic approach from Science and Technology Studies, we argue that digital technologies may be understood as active participants in the practice of ethnographic research, as they mediate the relationship between ethnographers and their informants and thereby influence data collection - and data itself - in specific ways. For example, people at different stages in their life cycle may prefer different kinds of technologies, and these various types of technologies shape what kind of data can be collected through them. Doing fieldwork through digital technologies involves considerable tinkering to establish what such fieldwork actually is, how it impacts what is considered the researcher's 'field,' and how it should be done to be considered 'good.' We propose that digital technologies co-create 'field events,' a notion which complicates the standards of fieldwork that are based on spatial and temporal boundaries. The possibility of 'field events' calls upon ethnographers to seriously, and collectively, re-consider what 'good fieldwork' through digital technologies may be.

Paper short abstract:

In this talk I explore health information circulating on an international email list for people with Parkinson's disease. The dual purpose of the list—of support and knowledge exchange—is shaped by a particular politics of hope, which channels knowledge and projects it into the future.

Paper long abstract:

What are the forces shaping the health information that virtual community members circulate, evaluate and incorporate? In this talk I explore health information circulating on an international, though mainly North American, email list for people suffering from Parkinson's disease. The dual purpose of the list—of support and knowledge exchange—is shaped by a particular politics of hope, which channels knowledge and projects it into the future. At the same time, these politics of hope have a concrete impact on practices and experiences of the present. The List member's bodily sensations are, at least partly, based on what I want to call "embodied molecules"— the effectiveness of interventions (such as medications) created by the List's "cyberbody." Cyberbodies, in this context, are created through the virtual community members' collective embodied learning.