Honoring Civic Participation Among Older Adults from Black and Latine Communities in the U.S. and Latin America
• Time: May 31th, 2024 (Friday) 12:30-13:30
• Location: R401 at the Department of Social Work, NTU
• Speaker: Dr. Laurent Reyes, Assistant Professor, School of Social Welfare, UC Berkeley
• Host: Julia Shu-Huah Wang, Associate Professor, NTUSW
This lecture will be conducted in English without translation.
• About the Speake
Laurent Reyes is an assistant professor in UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare. Dr. Reyes is committed to developing research that challenges current systems of inequality that affect historically marginalized older adults. As an activist scholar and storyteller, she leans on qualitative and visual methods to listen and elevate lifetime stories of resistance and solidarity among Latinx and Black elders to re-imagine a new framework of civic participation emerging from their lived experience. The goal of this research is to shift socio-political focus and resources towards the work and solutions that historically oppressed communities have developed to survive and thrive in the context of systemic oppression and ethnoracial persecution.
• About the Lecture
In the past 20 years, scholars, foundations, and policy makers have expressed increasing interest in supporting civic participation in later life. However, current conceptualizations of civic participation fail to accurately measure and represent the experiences of civic participation among historically marginalized older adults, partly due to poor measures that present social and political activities as exclusively separate categories and focus on formal civic participation. My work re-defines civic participation from the lens of historically ethnoracially marginalized older adults to avoid further erasure of their experiences and contributions. I present six moments of civic participation, by which we can understand and measure the experiences and contributions of Latinx and Black older adults. These movements (survival, healing, justice, liberation, joy and spirit) give insight into the context of why people act and consider the sociopolitical and cultural context of their participation. These findings have implications for the development of future theoretical frameworks and measurements of civic participation that center the experiences of minority older adults.
※ No registration required, walk-in welcome.
※ Lunch boxes will be provided to the first ten attendees on the day of the event.
This event is held by NTUSW and Taiwan Social Resilience Research Center.
This event is supported by Yushan Young Scholar Program (NTU-112V1018-2) and Taiwan Social Resilience Research Center (112L900304) from the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Taiwan Ministry of Education.
