Kim Sawchuk

“I'm G-Mom on the Phone”

We explore how a diverse group of grandparents, mostly grandmothers, use the cell phone to interact with their grandchildren. Through “remote” grandparenting seniors found ways into relationships with their grandchildren like many of them had experienced as grandchildren and simultaneously provided insightful commentary on changing communication relations.

The wireless spectrum : the politics, practices, and poetics of mobile media

As evidenced by the clientele in any urban coffee shop, devices such as cell phones, BlackBerries, and Wi-Fi-enabled laptops have proliferated, particularly during the past ten years. The Wireless Spectrum explores how wireless technologies have modified both individual and public life, transforming our experiences of space, time, and place, while reshaping our day-to-day interactions. Bringing together visual artists, designers, activists, and communication and humanities scholars to reflect on mobile media, this collection engages a new terrain of interdisciplinary research. Interrogating these new forms of community and communication practices as they are emerging in Canada and around the world, the essays in The Wireless Spectrum ask how these new technologies transfigure subjectivities, creating new forms of social behaviour and provocative aesthetic practices.

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

Abstract 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.

Not notable enough: feminism and expertise in Wikipedia

ABSTRACT 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 Wikientries on ageing so that they include an intersectional perspective, especially with regard to gender. Our excursion into Wikipedia reveals how certain entries act as sites of contestation between different communities of practice, such as feminist scholars and Wikipedia experts. We document and discuss three interconnected discursive guidelines over which contestation takes place: notability, verifiability, and tone. These guidelines govern the way that Wikipedia operates in relationship to dominant discourses on age and gender. They are at the heart of its inequitable treatment of content matter.

Animating the Anatomical Specimen: Regional Dissection and the Incorporation of Photography in J.C.B. Grant’s An Atlas of Anatomy

In 1943 Dr J.C.B. Grant, of the University of Toronto, published the first anatomical atlas ever fully produced in North America, An Atlas of Anatomy. Within the history of biomedical teaching, the publication of this textbook is remarkable for at least two reasons, both connected to the themes of animation and automation. The visual narrative of the anatomical body found in Grant’s Atlas encapsulated a paradigmatic shift in gross anatomy from a systemic approach (dividing the body into its systems) to a regional anatomy (dividing the body into areas containing interlocking systems). The contextually contingent reasons for this shift in medical training are represented in the production of this textbook. What is crucial is that anatomy is thus conceived as directly applicable to surgical practice, which intervenes on the bodies of the living, rather than the dead. The second important dimension of Grant’s Atlas was his rigorous, yet invisible, incorporation of photography into the practice of medical illustration. Grant’s Atlas systematically deployed hand-drawn tracings of photographic images in the production of his bestselling textbook to affirm an indexical connection to a ‘real body’. At the same time, this use of photography is erased within the visuals, which rely instead on hand-drawn illustrations (line-drawings and carbon-dusting) to produce this particular pedagogy of the anatomical body. The production of ‘textbook anatomy’ is thus articulated to changes in technical modes of representation (photography) and to the new techniques in print-technologies from the late 19th until the mid 20th century.

Promising Practices in Collaborative Digital Literacy and Digital Media-Making with Older Adults

For the past seven years, the Ageing, Communication, Technologies (ACT) team (http://actproject.ca/) has been creating workshops and events that engage older adults, many who have limited access to digital tools and technologies, in digital media-making projects. We collaborate with elders in a variety of Montreal settings, from public libraries, to public housing and organizations founded and run by seniors developing ways to both meet their individual wish to engage with digital media, as well as their collective desire to “take a class” that is social and sociable. Building on our past work on “precarious ageing and media-making”, as well as the impetus to “mediatize” older adults and organizations, we focus on both the concept of promising practices and the specific insights of those who lead these workshops: the students and professionals employed by ACT, all of whom are young adults, between the ages of 18 and 35. We begin by offering a set of five “promising practices” for collaborative digital media making with seniors. From our point of view, promising practices are not prescriptive, but rather a way of contesting some of the imperatives and normativities subsumed by the idea of “best practices”. We conclude the paper by describing the key principles to our contextualization of “best practices” in terms of digital workshops for seniors.

Maintaining Connections : Octo- and Nonagenarians on Digital ‘Use and Non-use’

Abstract The concepts of user and non-user are frequently deployed within media and communications literature. What do these terms mean if examined regarding age and ageing? In this article we explore and trouble these notions through an analysis of twenty-two conversations with a group of octogenarians and nonagenarians living in a retirement home. Their descriptions of their changing uses of media througout lifetime, and their encounters with mobile phones, computers, newspapers, television, radio and landline phones, are presented as a set of ‘techno-biographies’ that challenge binary divisions of use and non-use, linear notions of media adoption, and add texture to the idea of ‘the fourth age’ as a time of life bereft of decisional power. Speaking with octogenarians and nonagenarians provides insights into media desires, needs and uses, and opens up ‘non-use’ as a complex, variegated activity, rather than a state of complete inaction or disinterest.