"Carving a future out of the past and the present": Rethinking aging futures.

This article emerged out of arts-based research carried out in Nogojiwanong (Peterborough, Canada) in 2019, which explored community members' perspectives on aging futures within their shared place. Over the course of 2 days, a diverse intergenerational group came together to imagine positive aging futures, recording a series of group discussions and co-creating art through this process. Analyzed against efforts to expand dominant "successful aging" discourses, this research revealed three key themes. First, in contrast to unrooted and individualistic assumptions embedded within successful aging, participants identified attentiveness to place and community, and in particular relationships with Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg land, territory, and nation, as key to their visions for successful aging futures. Second, challenging assumptions about hetero-reproductive generativity as necessary for aging well, participants described their commitments to intergenerational relationships that are expansive, beyond biological ties, and existing within interspecies networks of relationships. Finally, contesting underpinning notions of aging as part of a linear process ending in death - and successful aging as inherently a struggle against this process - participants explored aging futures as part of a spiral temporality involving regeneration, identifying relationships with people and place that extend beyond the linear timeframe of singular lives, connected forward into a more distant future and backward into a longer past. We draw forth these themes in the interest of queering and decolonizing ongoing conversations surrounding successful aging and generativity within the field of aging studies.

Defying, producing, and overlooking stereotypes? The complexities of mobilizing "grandmotherhood" as political strategy.

This article explores the Canadian Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign, a mobilization of older women responding to the effects of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on interviews, participant observation, and archival work, this article looks at how and to what effect "grandmotherhood," as discourse, was mobilized and deployed, in fluid and fractured ways, in order to increase members' credibility as global social justice actors and build their solidarity with African women. These mobilizations functioned to uphold essentialist notions of what being a grandmother means, while also challenging stereotypes of older women as frail and disengaged.

Rethinking the conceptual terrain of AIDS scholarship: lessons from comparing 27 years of AIDS and climate change research.

BACKGROUND: While there has recently been significant medical advance in understanding and treating HIV, limitations in understanding the complex social dimensions of HIV/AIDS epidemics continue to restrict a host of prevention and development efforts from community through to international levels. These gaps are rooted as much in limited conceptual development as they are in a lack of empirical research. METHODS: In this conceptual article, the authors compare and contrast the evolution of climate change and AIDS research. They demonstrate how scholarship and response in these two seemingly disparate areas share certain important similarities, such as the "globalization" of discourses and associated masking of uneven vulnerabilities, the tendency toward techno-fixes, and the polarization of debates within these fields. They also examine key divergences, noting in particular that climate change research has tended to be more forward-looking and longer-term in focus than AIDS scholarship. CONCLUSION: Suggesting that AIDS scholars can learn from these key parallels and divergences, the paper offers four directions for advancing AIDS research: (1) focusing more on the differentiation of risk and responsibility within and among AIDS epidemics; (2) taking (back) on board social justice approaches; (3) moving beyond polarized debates; and (4) shifting focus from reactive to forward-looking and proactive approaches.

The making of vulnerabilities: understanding the differentiated effects of HIV and AIDS among street traders in Warwick Junction, Durban, South Africa.

The end of apartheid in South Africa has led to political-economic transition, the deregulation of cities, and increased population mobility, with growing numbers of people living and working in sub-standard and 'informal' urban conditions. These processes have created a fertile terrain for the rapid spread of HIV, especially in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. Few studies have considered how the HIV epidemic's outcomes are interacting with other societal processes, such as globalisation and urbanisation, or how these processes collectively converge with place-specific conditions to expose, drive and compound vulnerabilities to HIV and AIDS. This paper links an analysis of the political economy of South Africa's HIV epidemic with findings from an ethnographic case study with street traders in Warwick Junction, the largest trading hub in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal.