Wednesday, January 28th, 2025 @ NOON
Book Launch: Aging With Agility – Michelle Pannor Silver
In Person: Room SWK 422, 4th Floor, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, 246 Bloor St West, M5S 1V4
Online: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/87566695859
In Aging with Agility: How Elite Athletes and Ordinary Folks Embrace Exercise with Age (Columbia University Press), U of T professor and Institute member Michelle Pannor Silver examines what motivates people to move and what holds them back. Drawing on nearly a decade of research and personal stories, Silver reveals how our perceptions of aging shape our physical health, sense of purpose, and connection to others. Save 20% with code CUP20 when you order directly from the publisher cup.columbia.edu
Light refreshments will be provided. We hope you can join us in person or online!
Wednesday, October 29th, 2025 @ NOON (EDT)
Watch the recording of our October seminar below.
Click here to watch the recording on YouTube.
Making and remaking a sense of home amidst later life homelessness
While there are concerns about homelessness and accommodation insecurity in later life, scholarly understanding of whether and how older people currently in homelessness can achieve a sense of home remains underdeveloped. This talk will explore the role of personal agency and environmental conditions in how older people in Ireland perceive and construct a sense of home, amidst aging, homelessness and insecurity across the life course.
Kieran Walsh is Professor of Ageing & Public Policy in the Discipline of Economics, and Director of the Irish Centre for Social Gerontology (ICSG), within the Insitute for Lifecourse and Society, at the University of Galway. His research focuses on ageing in place, social exclusion in later life, and older people’s lived experience of major life transitions and inequality. Kieran was the Chair of the ROSEnet COST Action research network on ‘Reducing old-age social exclusion’ (2016-2020), a 200 member network across 41 countries, and is currently Scientific Coordinator of the Marie-Sklodowska Curie doctoral training network on ‘Advancing research and training on ageing, place and home ‘- HOMeAGE.
More about the research paper explored in this talk:
Research Design and Methods: An inductive qualitative approach was employed and draws data from one focus group and 24 life-course interviews involving 24 older men and five older women (50-74 years) experiencing homelessness in Ireland. Results: Five domains, through which older adult participants exerted agency to make and remake a sense of home were identified despite past and present dislocations and structural factors. The findings capture a future orientated long-trajectory developmental process, where sense of home can serve as a potential outcome in a broader trajectory of hope, identity and wellbeing.
Discussion and implications: A framework is presented illustrating how individuals negotiated uncertainty, environmental chaos and growing older to move closer to home. It also illustrates how policy development must be recalibrated to attend to these groups’ voices, given the significant influence of structural factors on present conditions.
See events in our Emerging Scholars Seminar Series here.