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For three years, Ruth E. Ray visited and participated in eight writing groups at six senior centers in inner-city and suburban Detroit, looking for ways in which the elderly fashion their memories through personal narrative. Her innovative book involves the reader in the construction of life stories as a richly rewarding and highly social process that often reveals the types of relationships that dominate the lives of group members, the majority of whom are women. Because Ray wrote and responded herself and shares her anxiety and triumph in presenting her writing to women old enough to be her mother, some of a different race and class, Beyond Nostalgia is an excellent primer for professional...
Trained as a cultural historian, Thomas R. Cole is one of the most influential scholars of his generation, with his work moving beyond and impacting many other fields and disciplines. His work includes The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Cole also published No Color Is My Kind: The Life of Eldrewey Stearns and the Integration of Houston, creating along with the book an accompanying film, The Strange Demise of Jim Crow, which was nominated for a regional Emmy and a National Humanities Medal. Cole created a number of other films as well. In all of his work, there is an emphasis on religion, spirituality, and moral meaning. Cole is also a Jewish spiritual director, and this work has become a major focus for him in retirement. This edited volume engages or responds to Cole’s work, which spans cultural history, oral history, aging studies, film, medical humanities, religious studies, and more. As such, this book is not about Cole per se, but the impact of his ideas and subsequent inspirations.
This book offers teachers a convenient means of broadening their understanding of various kinds of composition theory and the steadily emerging field of teacher research by high school and college instructors. The book is designed to arouse individual teachers' interest in composition theory and encourage them to learn about and participate in teacher research. The book covers the various branches of teacher research and the key ideas of its many proponents. Individual chapters include: (1) The Move toward Theory in Composition; (2) Theory and Practice from a Feminist Perspective; (3) The Argument for Teacher Research; (4) Comprehension from Within: K-12 Teacher Research and the Construction of Knowledge; (5) Contextual Constraints on Knowledge Making: Graduate Student Teacher Research; and (6) Toward a Teacher-Research Approach to Graduate Studies. An interview with National Writing Project Teacher-Researchers, along with a sample syllabus for a graduate course in composition theory, are appended. (HB)
Examines the contributions of the humanities to understanding of aging and the aged. Essays spanning history, the arts, religious and spiritual studies, and philosophy review humanistic perspectives on aging. This second edition has been updated to be more accessible and includes new chapters on Eastern and Western perspectives, Christian and Jewish traditions in aging, and spirituality and aging. Cole is professor and director of the graduate program at the Institute for Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch. Kastenbaum is professor of gerontology in the department of communication at Arizona State University. Ray is associate professor of English at Wayne State University. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Margaret Cruikshank’s Learning to Be Old examines what it means to grow old in America today. The book questions social myths and fears about aging, sickness, and the other social roles of the elderly, the over-medicalization of many older people, and ageism. In this book, Cruikshank proposes alternatives to the ways aging is usually understood in both popular culture and mainstream gerontology. Learning to Be Old does not propose the ideas of “successful aging” or “productive aging,” but more the idea of “learning” how to age. Featuring new research and analysis, the third edition of Learning to be Old demonstrates, more thoroughly than the previous editions, that aging is soc...
Explore feminist ideals and advocacy for aging women in health care, home life, work, and retirement! Fundamentals of Feminist Gerontology strives to increase women’s self-esteem and their overall quality of life by encouraging education and by putting a stop to age, sex, and race discrimination. As a student or professional in psychology, social work, or gerontology, you will learn about feminist conceptions of retirement, economic issues, psychological issues, and social issues and will explore studies on old age discrimination and devaluation and sexism toward women in Western societies to gain an understanding of the experiences of these women. This book also shows how some women are e...
Americans enjoy longer lives and better health, yet we are becoming increasingly obsessed with trying to stay young. What drives the fear of turning 30, the boom in anti-aging products, the wars between generations? What men and women of all ages have in common is that we are being insidiously aged by the culture in which we live. In this illuminating book, Margaret Morganroth Gullette reveals that aging doesn't start in our chromosomes, but in midlife downsizing, the erosion of workplace seniority, threats to Social Security, or media portrayals of "aging Xers" and "greedy" Baby Boomers. To combat the forces aging us prematurely, Gullette invites us to change our attitudes, our life storytelling, and our society. Part intimate autobiography, part startling cultural expose, this book does for age what gender and race studies have done for their categories. Aged by Culture is an impassioned manifesto against the pernicious ideologies that steal hope from every stage of our lives.
Nobody's Burden: Lessons on Old Age from the Great Depression is the first book-length study of the experience of old-age during the Great Depression. Part history, part social critique, the contributors rely on archival research, social history, narrative study and theoretical analysis to argue that Americans today, as in the past, need to rethink old-age policy and accept their shared responsibility for elder care. The Great Depression serves as the cultural backdrop to this argument, illustrating that during times of social and economic crisis, society's ageism and the limitations in old-age care become all the more apparent. At the core of the book are vivid stories of specific men and w...
This volume examines the role of rhetoric in today’s culture of democratic activism. The volume takes on two of the most significant challenges currently facing contemporary rhetorical studies: (1) the contested meanings and practices of democracy and civic engagement in global context, and (2) the central role of rhetoric in democratic activist practices. In presenting a variety of political and rhetorical struggles in their specific contexts, editors Seth Kahn and JongHwa Lee allow contributors to reflect on and elaborate possibilities for both activist approaches to rhetorical studies, and rhetorical approaches to activist projects, facilitating better understanding the socio-political ...