Amanda Ciafone

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Department of Media & Cinema Studies

This essay introduces readers to key themes in critical gerontology and age studies and asserts their centrality to contemporary history and politics. Age scholars and critical gerontologists push back against perspectives that individualize and medicalize old age as a natural or universal stage in a singular life course explained solely by biology...

Armed with the recently coined term “ageism” and experience organizing in both the old and new lefts, in the 1970s and 80s the women of the radical movement, the Gray Panthers, set out to intervene in the representation of old age in U.S. media. Mobilizing through their Media Watch Task Force and local committees, they monitored media for examples...

The Coca-Cola Company ofreció a distintas embotelladoras alrededor del mundo sus concentrados de bebidas gaseosas y sus marcas registradas, para que estas produjeran y vendieran sus bebidas en zonas específicas. Colombia fue incluida en esta iniciativa a partir de 1927. Este sistema de franquicia permitió la expansión internacional de la compañía s...

Institutional care for seniors offers a cultural repository for fears and hopes about an aging population. Although enormous changes have occurred in how institutional care is structured, the legacies of the poorhouse still persist, creating panicked views of the nursing home as a dreaded fate. The paradoxical nature of a space meant to be both hos...

Transnational network narrative films attempt a cognitive mapping of global systems through a narrative form interconnecting disparate or seemingly unrelated characters, plotlines, and geographies. These films demonstrate networks on three levels: a network narrative form, themes of networked social relations, and networked industrial production. W...

With the sudden, almost ubiquitous reentry of The Coca-Cola Company to India during economic liberalization, the branded commodity became a sign of both aspirational global consumer-citizenship for India's urban middle class and of corporate enclosure for those dispossessed of material and symbolic resources to fuel this consumption. Village commun...

Amanda Ciafone will discuss gaining access to and working with corporate sources -- documents and individuals -- and the challenges of making proprietary history public. Can you get into the corporate archive? How do you get beyond it? What are the "ways of being" when doing oral histories or interviews with different actors?