ASSA Team Update – April 2021

It’s been almost two years since the members of the ASSA team came back from fieldwork and we have lots of updates and new material coming in the next couple of weeks!

What is the ASSA team up to?

The 6th of May will see the launch of the first three books in the ‘Ageing with Smartphones’ series, which is based on the results of the team’s research:

• Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy: Care and Community in Milan and Beyond, by Shireen Walton
• Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland: When life becomes craft, by Pauline Garvey and Daniel Miller
• The Global Smartphone: Beyond a youth technology, by Daniel Miller, Laila Abed Rabho, Patrick Awondo, Maya de Vries, Marília Duque, Pauline Garvey, Laura Haapio-Kirk, Charlotte Hawkins, Alfonso Otaegui, Shireen Walton, and Xinyuan Wang

All of the books will be open-access and downloadable from the UCL Press site.

A Twitter thread summarising some of the points in the Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland book is here. This can also be found on Instagram here.

The Global Smartphone is a comparative book that focuses on the take up of smartphones by older people in all of our 10 fieldsites, many of which you might have become familiar with by now if you have been following this blog!

• Cuan, Ireland
• Thornhill, Dublin, Ireland
• Lusozi, Kampala, Uganda
• Yaoundé, Cameroon
• Bento, São Paulo, Brazil
• Santiago, Chile
• Kyoto city and Tosa-chō in Kōchi Prefecture, Japan
• Dar al-Hawa, Al-Quds (east Jerusalem)
• NoLo, Milan, Italy

The rest of the books will talk about each specific fieldsite in more depth, focusing on ageing, retirement, and the changes to the way in which people live, communicate, resolve intergenerational conflicts, and care for each other and their own health – all aided by the smartphone, of course.

3-WEEK FUTURELEARN COURSE

We also have a 3-week course on Futurelearn coming up on the 10^th of May, called ‘An Anthropology of Smartphones: Communication, Ageing and Health‘.

The course is free to take and is also based on the results of the ASSA team’s research – it is self-paced and makes use of interactive discussions and short films in what should be a comprehensive look at topics like smartphone use in different social and cultural contexts, models of ageing, and different aspects of mobile health (including the team’s alternative approach to it).

You can now pre-enrol onto the course and you will get notified when it starts. The team will be present throughout the course to interact with learners and give feedback on the various discussions happening throughout the course.

OPEN SESSION ON THE 26^TH OF MAY

On the 26th of May we will host an open session where members of the public and anyone interested in the project can meet the team and hear more about their fieldwork while having the opportunity to ask them questions.

The event will be hosted by UCL’s Centre for Digital Anthropology and chaired by Hannah Knox. You can register for the event here.

NEW PAGES ON OUR WEBSITE

In the meantime, we have also updated the Publications page on our website with a few recent open-access papers on performing healthy ageing through images, deploying visual aids such as emojis and stickers to maintain a digital public façade, and much more!

We’ve also published a Discoveries page, which summarises the main findings of the project. These are illustrated through short videos, infographics and a few cartoon-style illustrations. There will be more cartoons to come in the near future and we are excited to share the results of our research through this creative medium!

In the meantime, we will continue blogging here on a weekly basis.

Finally, if you haven’t had a look at our project trailer yet, you can do so below!