What do you do?

 

I work with Dr. BART SIMON to learn about the experiences of people who feel that they are "out of time" or are "timed out" from living the way they want to because they are not 'acting' in the way that people their age should.

 

The tensions between personal and social time emerges with the push-pull of NOSTALGIA.

 

 

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What will you study?

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I am interested in how institutions, policies, and beliefs utilize nostalgia in their narratives to target certain populations to live according to a socially defined way of being with time. How does time and nostalgia work as a method of social control?

 

Conversely, how does nostalgia -- as a personal activity, way of life, or desire by individuals -- act as a rebellion or resistance against the social definitions of being and time?

 

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Who is concerned with this research?

 

Youthful seniors in care homes, researchers of loneliness, sociologists of work and time, hopeful in-patients wanting to live "more" and "better", tired single-parents, gamers who are told to "get a life" and whose meaningful interactions are reduced to a waste of time, those in social isolation who still think about tomorrow but are trapped in yesterday... the list goes on.

 

 

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What methods do you draw from?

 

As a sociologist, my background is in symbolic interactionism. For this research I cast widely and deeply through material culture, object/photo elicitation, actor-network theory, Marxist critiques of time and labor, nostalgia studies, time studies, social psychology, and the self.

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