"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.