Videos from Professor George Rousseau Annual Seminar Series 2017

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 3^rd and 4^th Ages of Man’

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

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

• What is the 5^th 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 5^th age of  man
• History, memory and decline in the 5^th age
• The inhumane treatment of centenarians in the 5^th 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"