Grant: Meetings, Planning and Dissemination Grant: Aging

"Archival and Ethnographic Methods for Studies of Aging and Long-term Care" will bring together an international interdisciplinary team of recognized experts, students, and partners in the fields of health studies and long-term care studies to consider how two methods drawn from social sciences and humanities can contribute to studies of aging and long-term residential care. The goals for this workshop are: to engage new researchers in studies on aging and long-term care and; to engage researchers who currently work on aging and long-term care to explore the possibilities offered by new methods. Archival methods can be a significant addition to research tools for studies of aging and long-term care, allowing researchers to take into account the historical trajectories and missed opportunities of institutions, policies and debates that affect not only how aging is experienced in the present, but also how these factors influence future possibilities. Ethnographic methods allow researchers to study the daily processes, practices and interactions of elders' lives and link them to wider social, political and economic relations. Both of these methods allow us to further develop the picture provided by statistics to reach a more fine-grained, nuanced understanding of the daily practices that structure aging and care. This understanding can contribute to policy development in areas such as accountability, work organization, funding and organization and approaches to care. The workshop is one part of a large-scale effort to develop an international, interdisciplinary, collaborative network of scholars concerned with Long-Term Care that has as its hub the MCRI project, Re-imagining Long-Term Residential Care, (P.I. Pat Armstrong, York University).