Sally Chivers is Director of the Trent Centre for Aging & Society, and a Full Professor of English and Gender & Women’s Studies at Trent University, where she teaches about illness, disability, and aging in literature, film and popular culture. She is the author of The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema (2011) and From Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary Culture and Women’s Narratives (2003), and the co-editor of Care Home Stories: Aging, Disability and Long-Term Residential Care (2017) (available open access here: Care Home Stories) and The Problem Body: Projecting Disability and Film (2010). Her ongoing research focuses on the gerontological humanities, care systems, and media studies of age, gender and disability based on the belief that there are new and better stories to tell about aging, disability and care.
Professor Chivers brings her expertise on the cultural politics of disability, aging, and care to her role as Associate Director of 7 year collaborative Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Grant "Imagining Age-Friendly 'Communities within Communities': International Promising Practices” that builds on the World Health Organization’s “Age-Friendly Communities” global initiative. The interdisciplinary research team will travel to 12 cities in Canada and across the world to investigate how culture and gender matter in creating age-friendly cities.
Professor Chivers's keynote speech is available here.
John L. Jackson, Jr., is the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was previously Dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice and Special Adviser to the Provost on Diversity at Penn.
Jackson earned his B.A. in Communication (Radio/TV/Film) from Howard University, completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University, and served as a junior fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows before becoming Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.
He is the author of Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2001); Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (University of Chicago Press, 2005); Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (Basic Civitas, 2008); Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (Harvard University Press, 2013); Impolite Conversations: On Race, Politics, Sex, Money, and Religion, co-written with Cora Daniels (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2014), and Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment (NYU Press, 2016), co-written with Carolyn Rouse and Marla Frederick. He is also editor of Social Policy and Social Justice (2016), distributed by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
His most recent film, co-directed with Deborah A. Thomas, is Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens (Third World Newsreel, 2012), and he is currently part of the production team completing Making Sweet Tea: The Lives and Loves of Southern Black Gay Men.
An urban researcher, media ethnographer, anthropologist of religion, and theorist of race/ethnicity, Jackson’s work also critically explores how film and other non-traditional or multi-modal formats can be most effectively utilized in specifically scholarly research projects, and he is one of the founding members of CAMRA, the University of Pennsylvania-based initiative organized around creating visual and performative research projects and producing rigorous criteria for assessing them.
He is currently a faculty member at Penn’s new Center for Experimental Ethnography, and he has affiliations with Penn’s Departments of Africana Studies and Anthropology, as well as with the Graduate School of Education and the School of Social Policy & Practice.
Professor Jackson's keynote is available here.