Videos: Last Chapter Seminar (plenaries)

George Rousseau is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society based at the University of Oxford and the recipient of honorary degrees honoris causa. He has been a Professor at UCLA, Regius Professor at King’s College Aberdeen, and was the Founding Co-Director of Oxford University’s Centre for the History of Childhood. Among Rousseau’s books is a trilogy about Enlightenment culture (1991) – Enlightenment Borders, Enlightenment Crossings, and Perilous Enlightenment; This Long Disease, my Life: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton, 1968) written with Marjorie Hope Nicolson; The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought (California, 1990); Gout: The Patrician Malady (Yale, 1998, with Roy Porter); Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); as well as Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility (2004). His most recent book, Rachmaninoff’s Cape (London: Virtuoso) recently appeared in Russian translation. Professor Rousseau is a core member of the research project Historicizing the ageing self https://www.uib.no/en/project/ageing

David Troyansky, History and Ageing: Authority, Marginalization, and Celebration _________________________________________ The talk will offer reflections on writing the history of old age--particularly the social and cultural history of late life since the eighteenth century--during a pandemic that targets and sometimes offers occasion to celebrate older people’s lives. It will explore the circumstances in which the aged have been visible or central and those when they have been invisible or marginalized. It will use the French Revolutionary Festival of Old Age and early formulas for the granting of retirement pensions as points of departure for understanding late life in an era of rapid change. David Troyansky is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He works primarily on the history of France and the history of old age. He is the author of Old Age in the Old Regime: Image and Experience in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989) and Aging in World History (New York and London: Routledge, 2016). He is co-editor of Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009) and a six-volume Cultural History of Old Age to be published by Bloomsbury Press, and he has recently completed a book manuscript on career and the right to retirement in post-Revolutionary France.

Beatrice Allegranti, Moving Kinship with the More-Than-Human _______________________________________ This presentation introduces Moving Kinship: feminist choreographic and dance movement psychotherapy practice, research and activism with people living with rare young onset dementia, their families, and the artistic team Beatrice Allegranti Company. The project highlights the experience of loss and grief, not as ‘lack’ but as an embodied-relational process: loss is visceral and not something that we ‘do’ alone. By presenting Moving Kinship, I discuss the ethics and politics of entanglement and its implications for dementia: we are not bounded self-contained fully formed humans but porous processes - enfolding within a complex network of body politics, language, affect, tactile-kinaesthetic relating, environments, technologies, and power structures. As such, my proposition is a more-than-human view of dementia that tangles with, and disrupts wider social, political, and cultural inequalities of age, loss, voice/language, memory, intimacy, vulnerability, and care. This presentation will precede the digital performance of I’ve Lost You Only To Discover That I Have Gone Missing, an internationally touring dance theatre production directly informed by the tangled experiences of people affected by young onset dementia, and the artistic team Beatrice Allegranti Company. Dr. Beatrice Allegranti is Reader in Dance Movement Psychotherapy and Choreography (University of Roehampton), an independent choreographer and UKCP registered dance movement psychotherapist. Beatrice’s choreography and film work has toured internationally (France, U.S.A, Norway, Finland, Ireland, Hong Kong, Japan, Poland) and her clinical experience includes private practice and the NHS (adult mental health and dementia services) and consultancy (Arts For Peace, Irish Defense Forces, Wellcome). Across her artistic, clinical and scholarly work, Beatrice’s embodied feminist focus involves an ethical re-visioning of the way we relate with/in the world through the lens of our intersectional body politics (gender, race, sexuality, age, class, mental health, environment). Beatrice Allegranti works with Professor Jill Halstead (Fakultet for kunst, musikk og design, UiB)