by Jocelyn Yerxa, Director, NS GovLab
In January 2020, our small team, along with a few partners and fellows came together to do some deep learning about decolonization. Since the COVID-19 global pandemic an even smaller group of us (Mo Dresch, Rachel Derrah, Steeven Pedneault from PRÉSÂGES and I) have taken a deeper dive into this work and created two creative social cartographies (CSC) of aging in collaboration with the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) Collective.
CSCs are teaching tools. They are not normative. They are not about describing reality accurately, but about moving conversations beyond points where they often get stuck. They use images, metaphors, analogies and words to invite different conversations. They are designed to help us to trace historical and systemic processes, to draw attention to points of tension, and to make visible aspects that are often made invisible and connections that are usually left hidden. Please keep this in mind as you engage with this cartography.
The post is about the Path of Life cartography (hear us talk about the Path of Life here). It is a critique of the dominant narrative in western society and culture about how the journey life is “supposed” to go. It is a tale of achievements ending with the requisite recognition at retirement and pointing towards a good death after a time of blissful retirement. The first frame shows how singular this path is and highlights a story that is very white, heteronormative, and middle class.
This frame is filled with promises of care, education, success, happiness and recognition. The path is built on entitlement to these things for a “job well done” following how life is meant to be led; connected to our role in society is to learn how to work, to work and then to reap benefits from a long work life in retirement.
The second frame in the Path of Life provides a window into another layer of this narrative. First it shows different people that is more reflective of the diversity in our communities. It also shows not just happy faces, but shows a variety of expressions a little more realistic of the breadth of emotions felt throughout life. This frame really attempts to reveal what the Path of Life built is on. Fear, unrealistic expectations, false promises, pressures, judgments and individual responsibility for your life course not going according to this neatly drawn out map. Here we have included some internal narratives for those who don’t fit the ideal portrayed in the first frame of Path of Life .
We also show the kinds of systemic issues along the bottom of this frame that people face throughout life. While these are not exclusively found in each of these stages but we often attempt to categorize them this way. The attempt is to further reveal how unrealistic expectations and false promises are underlying the path described in the first frame.
It is the second frame that also allows us to dive deeper with people we work with into the false promises and unrealistic expectations as individuals and the ways it has been harmful and helpful. We can also more specifically look at aging and growing older. For instance, looking at the fears about growing older and becoming a burden on family or others. There is also a deep desire for autonomy and expectation of maintaining independence as we age. This also includes the false promise of retirement. Many people are not able to retire and secondly that retirement is when you get to fulfill all the desires and joys you have been putting off throughout your life. Here we can begin to ask ourselves what are those thoughts, feelings and ways of being that are fed by these ideas and narratives about being older.
The third frame of the cartography we are looking to show the more realistic nature of our entanglements with others. It shows our collective, nonlinear complex connection to others, to other beings and the multiplicity of events and emotions we experience. Here we see birth and death not just happening at the beginning and end of our lives, but rather happening throughout our lives and the lives of those we care about and love. We see the kinds of intergenerational connections that have not been shown in the first two frames. We also get a glimpse of the pain and joy that happen throughout our lives.
In working with folx, this third frame is where we often ask people to scan their bodies and notice what is coming up. To think about any sensations, or emotions that might be brought to the forefront with seeing a different representation of life that includes more paths. We also ask people to reflect on how this reflects their experiences and also the ways it may not. In particular, if there are barriers to experiencing life in this interconnected, collective, nonlinear way.
In frame four, like frame two, it is unveiling or revealing some of the underlying narrative of the previous frame. This frame looks to have us examine the mythology of individual responsibility and autonomy to attain the entangled life paths. Here we have shown some of the underlying systemic barriers and violences people experience — poverty, climate devastation, racism, sexism, abuse, ableism, and ageism to name only a few.
It is with this frame that we look to work with each other to examine our collective responsibility to address the context that we are living in as well. This includes our complicity in these harms and continuing to uphold systems that reproduce these harms; especially for those who are reaping the benefits of the systems to examine how their benefits are at the expense of others, other beings and the planet. This can be particularly achieved when we think about the sorts of entitlements that are underlying the path in frame one and how those entitlements may block us from recognizing how these systemic barriers for others.
The last frame in the Path of Life is designed to give you an opportunity to identify the connections you have with the Path or Paths of Life. Please feel free to redraw this for yourself, or to download the image and print it off so you can work with it.
Finally, we hope that this CSC may have helped you to move beyond where you are uncomfortable to engage with aging. As a process it has been helpful for us to examine and re-examine our own views and thoughts. We would encourage anyone who was interested to try to create their own creative social cartographies.
