We would like to acknowledge this sacred land on which the University of Toronto operates. This land is the territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca and, most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. We are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this territory.
Storytellers
As a way of ripping the bandage off of the loss of her grandparents, Angelus Baliwas shares her memoir here to encourage the realization of intergenerational relationships. Through this work, she hopes to promote the reciprocal value of intergenerational communication in an increasingly globalized world.
Kristen Cain has two passions: the arts and the human condition. She marries her passions through her studies in Population Health, Mental Health, and Health Humanities. Kristen’s worldview is heavily influenced by her Black Canadian and Scottish lineage, and she draws from the latter in her story to create a metaphor which frames aging as the individual becoming monumental over time. Watch Kristen’s digital story.
Through poetry and carefully written prose, Fredriz Cantilado explores the ways that the linear systemization of time influences how individuals interact with the aging process and their own aging narratives. Watch Fredriz’s digital story.
Aretina Chan has always had a passion for thinking about health in a humanistic way, focusing on the social, emotional and artistic lives of marginalized people as a way to challenge dominant discourses of health, illness, and disease. Inspired by her background in art history, her work aims to push against fearful cultural narratives of aging as degeneration, and to re-imagine what it means to grow old. Watch Aretina’s digital story.
Andrea Charise is Associate Professor, Department of Health & Society, at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She directs The Resemblage Project. Watch Andrea’s digital story.
Shanice Chin has always had a passion for people and a deep interest in contributing to the health and well-being of racialized communities. While arts-based approaches to health practices have been new territory for her, particularly as it relates to ageing, she is invested in understanding the nuances of growing old. Through her digital story inspired by her grandmother, she explores the joys and challenges of ageing, especially in light of these COVID times.
Intergenerational programs were an eye-opener for Nadieshda Curiel-Cisneros to increase her knowledge of aging-related topics and gerontology. When she had the opportunity to explore intergenerational digital storytelling as a research method, she found it fascinating as it is an option to learn more about the individual differences in aging from a humanistic perspective, and its potential impact on healthcare delivery. Nadieshda’s digital story is an invitation for introspection into the transition and process of aging while incorporating her cultural identity.
After the recent passing of her mother, Martha, Monika Hirsch decided to dedicate her digital story to her mother’s experience with cancer and how it can be related to the process of aging (with disability), the COVID-19 pandemic, and those living within long-term care. Inspired by narratives of aging research and the health humanities, Monika’s project offers a very vulnerable and touching story that can be interpreted in more ways than one.
Gulamhussein Khalfan is seventy-three years old, of Indian ancestry, born and bred in Mombasa, Kenya. He started his working life as an Elementary School teacher and later left this profession to become a car salesperson, the career he continued when he migrated to Canada. He loves listening to Indian music, reading non-fiction, swimming, and spending time with his family. He is married and have three married sons and five grandchildren. Listen to Gulamhussein’s digital story.
Kaamil A. Khalfan’s research interests include understanding how the creative arts can enhance the health and wellbeing of vulnerable populations, with a particular interest in aging and older age. Watch Kaamil’s digital story.
Coming from a neuropsychological background, Larissa Lac’s perspective on human health and aging has always been restricted to a scientific one that focuses on deterioration. She has come to realize the humanities provides the necessary tools and critical skills to re-present, re-describe, and re-contextualize aging. She is excited to work with such a multidisciplinary team on The Resemblage Project to reassemble the meanings, significance, and imaginaries of aging through arts-based research. Watch Larissa’s digital story.
Iqra Mahmood aims to one day work in an interdisciplinary setting in which she can combine her passion for health research with her interest in the arts, design, and storytelling. By exploring the complicated experience of aging in Toronto through a digital storytelling medium, she has learned the various ways in which she can use her digital art and storytelling skills to inform health research and make it more meaningful for the institutions it informs and the participants that contribute to its formation. Watch Iqra’s digital story.
As a poet and prose writer who also wants to become a physician, Deborah Ocholi is fascinated by how studying narratives, how creating art, can interact with science and improve healthcare. Within Health Humanities as a whole, she has some ambitious goals, but for now, with this project, she wants to contribute to diversifying age studies through her digital story, and by constantly asking whose voices are missing when conducting inter-generational research.
Celeste Pang is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation project brings together critical perspectives from disability studies, queer anthropology, and anthropology of aging to consider, broadly, how a confluence of old age, gender nonconformity, and disability can matter, and what thinking about these together can do.
Mia Sanders is interested in historically tracing the relation between race and dis/ability, and activating this knowledge through prison justice and harm reduction. They are thrilled to be collaborating with their peers on The Resemblage Project, using arts-based research methods to explore what it looks, feels, and sounds like to grow older in Toronto, with particular attention to intersectional axes of identities. Watch Mia’s digital story.
Arriving in Canada at the age of three with his mother, Vijay Saravanamuthu is fascinated by the ways place, space and culture have facilitated both tensions and harmonies as he continually navigates new understandings of self in relation to the world around him. With a passion for aesthetics, Vijay engages creative practices to further explore themes of Tamilness, Brownness, Queerness and Softness. His digital story is an ode to Ranganayaki Chinna Thirucottyappa, Vijay’s Paati; a woman whose absence and presence in Vijay’s life is artfully entangled in experiences of uprooting, displacement, and loss, but also warmth, tenderness and the ever-imagined.
On an adventure in re-discovering the power behind creativity, Meagan Tanguilig explores the dynamics of family through the use of poetry. After suffering instances of loss, she highlights the cyclical journey of aging and healing in the digital form. She is continuing to research new ways to promote health through the use of art modalities. Listen to her digital story here.
As a big fan of data and numbers, Xiaoli Yang first thought that nothing was more attractive than the mysterious combinations of digits. Later, she realized that humanities, a fascinating subject which is like a large magnet, attracts all streams of thoughts in various areas and eventually these thoughts and theories gather and combine. Watch Xiaoli’s digital story.