How Did I Get Here?
I am rounding out my circular journey at UWM – I began in the English Department in 1995, when I came to the Center for (then) 20th Century Studies as a Rockefeller Fellow in Age Studies, and then a Brookdale Fellow from 1998 to 2000. I left academia for a few years (living and working in New York), but came back to UWM in 2003 (with a tenure home in the Theatre Department) as the Founding Director of the Center on Age & Community which I ran until it was reorganized in 2013. Just last year I shifted back to English from the Theatre Department and am thrilled to finally be able to work with graduate students in the Plan B program.
Research in the Time of Covid
Health disparities have always been with us in our fractured and crisis-oriented health care system. But COVID pointed neon signs at them. They were impossible not to see. My work has always been community-engaged. My training (with a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of Minnesota) in both critical theory and expressive and collaborative practices of immersive theatre have fueled my research to bring meaning-making opportunities to people shut out of citizenship and expression by the mere fact that they are older (out of the productivity loop / marketplace of our economy) and often with compound disabilities.
During the pandemic, I felt a huge responsibility. The research I’d been doing for years was about bringing meaning-making and community building to isolated older adults. And here was a moment when that is exactly what people needed. I got a bit exhausted working frantically with the team at the non-profit I work with (TimeSlips.org) to make our tools even more accessible. We had been piloting “Tele-Stories” already (20-30 minute story shaping workshops by phone), so we proposed and received a grant to offer that to elders in Milwaukee County. I also had my Storytelling class in the English Dept. learn the approach – and each student was paired with an older adult and shaped stories together by phone through service learning. If I had had the energy, I would have gotten an IRB and done research, but honestly, as a COVID long-hauler myself, it was just hard to find that energy.
The TimeSlips team curated a list of nursing homes across the world that were inviting cards and letters, and I must have written 500 of them. Just little postcards inviting the person into wonder at whatever image was on the cover. Could they imagine the smells? The sounds of the place? Or if it was a picture of an animal or person – imagine a name? A family? A dream?
As we (hopefully) wind towards going “back to normal,” I hope we do anything but. We’ve seen a glimpse of how isolated elders are, and at the profound impact of health disparities on communities of color and the incarcerated. Invitations to storying and meaning-making can build agency and assert one’s value as a citizen – not a recipient of health care. I have shifted some of my efforts toward joining discussion/action groups around the issue of social prescribing as a way to strategize policy changes that can fund and support expressive and community-building efforts as part of our care system.
I had a book (Creative Care) come out in 2020 – what timing THAT was – and it was incredibly hard work to try to engage people around the ideas so it didn’t disappear into the lost year of publishing. I did a ton of radio and zoom talks, which enabled me to engage with groups I never would have met otherwise.
For fun (or survival), I also wrote a screenplay and took banjo lessons.
From Here…
I think this is something we’ll keep (I hope at least) from the pandemic – virtual class visits and talks. It’s much better for the environment and enables us all to talk to more groups than if we had to travel. There is no tech replacement for human presence – I feel this in my bones and research supports it. But ideas do spread more easily this way and my colleagues in theater are finding many ways to make virtual meetings more humane and playful. My own research practices are shifting more fully toward voice and phone. Have you tried Clubhouse by the way? The relief of not being on camera all the time is palpable. And as I work with a team to bring Tele-Stories to rural Wisconsin elders, laptops and broadband are not a thing. The phone. So simple. And there is something about the human voice that the podcast addicted among us will agree – intimacy is possible to experience in a way that the visual complicates with powerful implicit bias.
Anne Basting, PhD
Rhetoric Society of America 