Ellen Gee Memorial Lecture

Simon Fraser University's Gerontology Research Centre invites you to the 20th Ellen Gee Memorial Lecture featuring Dr. Malcolm Cutchin. This hybrid event will take place on Tuesday, November 26, 2024, from 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm (PT) at SFU's Harbour Centre Campus in room HC 7000 (Earl & Jennie Lohn Policy Room).

About the Lecture

Environmental Gerontology and Geographical Gerontology have established that the problems of aging can often (if not always) be situated in places, whether those places are directly or indirectly related to those problems. Building on a series of projects re-framing for gerontology to better address problems of aging and place. We begin from the premise in our recent work that multiple societal level forces, such as technological developments, climate change, and changing political economies will threaten older adults in the coming decades and create significant further variation in older people's well-being across places on this planet. We then propose that gerontology must play a more relevant role in addressing those (and other) issues, and we offer a framework of how it can do so. Leveraging American philosophical pragmatism and its focus on meliorism, we extend our perspectives on 'place integration' and 'being in place' to sketch a gerontology that is both interventional and activist to promote engagement of older adults in re-making places to address emerging problems. Central to the argument is the explanation of the need to develop habits of social inquiry in place-based communities – both by gerontologists and older adults – to facilitate the practice of democratic/deliberative engagement and imaginative action needed to adjust to crises and changes older adults will face in the places they share. In addition to the work of Dewey and other pragmatist philosophers, we draw upon work by geographers Harney, Wills, and colleagues in the UK to suggest important principles and possibilities as well as challenges and limitations that would define such a 'melioristic gerontology.'

About the Speaker

Malcolm Cutchin earned a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Kentucky. Trained as a health geographer, he has held faculty appointments in gerontological institutes or centers as well as occupational therapy and geography departments at five institutions. Dr. Cutchin's more recent geographical research has focused on population health using social epidemiological approaches to understanding environmental stressors and health disparities. Also an active social gerontologist who is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, Dr. Cutchin has published over 100 scholarly works and has been a peer-reviewer for 40 academic journals. Since 1999 he has been the Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on 18 research and training awards totaling approximately $30 million.

Contact

If you have questions regarding this event, please email [email protected].

Host or Publisher SFU Gerontology