A new work of creative nonfiction, God’s Waiting Room (Rutgers University Press and Wits University Press) flips the script on racial discrimination in US long term care, showing how older ‘racist’ whites and their black nurses find grace together among their ghosts and despite the odds. Set thirty years after apartheid in South Africa, it features the untold story of Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island Prison nurse as well as stories of queer older adults and healthcare providers, teaching us how racism, ageism, and sexism impact where we end up, who cares, and what matters in the end. While grounded in seven years of ethnographic research, the book is narrated as taking place in a single day and employs color photos and visually striking elements of poetic form, translation, and prose. This seminar offers a window into the author’s creative process, situating these narrative elements within histories of imagistic and ethnographic poetry and relating the book to recent imagistic approaches in the anthropology of aging, care, and the Otherwise.
Casey Golomski, a creative writer and cultural and medical anthropologist, is a Department Chair and Associate Professor at the University of New Hampshire, with visiting appointments at the universities of Pretoria and the Witwatersrand. He is the author of the book Funeral Culture (Indiana University Press) and many articles, special issues, and poems in anthropology, African and Black studies, and literary journals.
HOW TO CITE
Please cite as: Casey Golomski. 2024. “God’s Waiting Room: Images of Care in Poetic Form”, webinar by Images of Care Collective, AAGE, AgeNet and VANEASA. 12 December 2024, available at:https://youtu.be/7JD5WXT2q_s?si=CNSwcxgoog2DIfS4
MORE ABOUT THE SERIES “IMAGES, AGEING AND CARE”
This webinar series – free and open to all- gathers anthropologists and image-makers interested in exploring the ontological and epistemological connections between images, aging and care, treating the relationship and these phenomena as requiring and inviting interrogation. It is sponsored by the Images of Care Collective, the Association for Anthropology, Gerontology and the Life Course (AAGE), EASA’s Age and Generations Network (AgeNet) and the Network for Visual Anthropology of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (VANEASA). You can see our past webinars here.
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