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Historicizing the ageing self: Literature, medicine, psychology, law
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Videos from Professor George Rousseau Annual Seminar Series 2017

Seminar in collaboration with Professor Bernt Engelsen (Haukeland University Hospital) and Curator Eli Okkenhaug (KODE Art Museums in Bergen).

A gnarled and hollow old oak tree
A gnarled and hollow old oak tree (Quercus robur L.) sheltering a shepherd and his sheep. Etching after J.G.Strutt, 1823.
Photo:
Wikimedia Commons

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Videos from Professor George Rousseaus seminar series "Challenges of Interdisciplinarity for a Cultural History of Ageing: Theoria & Praxis" 29–31 May at the University of Bergen.
See further information about the seminar series

LESSON 1
Professor George Rousseau:
'This is just about old people – why should we be interested?'

  • Why study the old and what it tells us about ourselves
  • Aging and old age in the humanities and sciences

LESSON 2
Professor George Rousseau:
'Theoria: Further reflections on interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century'

  • Approaches to studying ageing: disciplines and the division of knowledge
  • The formation of young, maturing, and old-age disciplines
  • The forging of a 'new interdisciplinarity' to navigate the increasingly narrow gap between the humanities and the sciences
  • Ageing and the production of future disciplinary knowledge

LESSON 3
Professor George Rousseau:
Praxis: ‘How can I do this work?’ 

  • Ageing and methodology: what are the available approaches to ageing?
  • What ‘late style’ tells us about how we can do our work
  • The fusion of theory and praxis in approaches to ageing and old age

LESSON 4
Professor Bernt Engelsen:
‘The ageing self in an epileptological and neuropsychiatric setting, with reflections on empathy’

  • Self as a mental image of a fragmented neuronal composition with cerebral gates of interactive areas and functions.
  • Self in epilepsy and neuropsychiatry
  • Neurodegeneration reveals transient and lasting alterations in self states and state shifts.

LESSON 5
Professor George Rousseau
‘History Lessons:  Revisiting the 3rd and 4th Ages of Man’

  • What history shows us about ageing and lateness: the concepts of ‘earlier ages’ and ‘later ages’
  • Who constructed the 3rd and 4th ages of man?
  • The major historical and cultural forces driving these two new ages
  • Decline and declinism in the 3rd and 4th ages of man
  • Is declinism an illusion?

LESSON 6
Professor George Rousseau
Imagining the 5th Age of Man: Fantasy or Fiction?

  • What is the 5th age of man?
  • Self, selfhood, and personhood in the new age: the aggregate of affect
  • Affects of loss versus affects of forgetting
  • The appearances of declinism in the 5th age of  man
  • History, memory and decline in the 5th age
  • The inhumane treatment of centenarians in the 5th age
  • Extinction and evolution: evolving rather than losing and forgetting

LESSON 7
Curator Eli Okkenhaug
"Depicting old age in contemporary photography: A few examples by Mette Tronvoll"