Thriving-in-Place: Examining the impact of intergenerational living in the Toronto HomeShare Program

Most global cities, like Toronto, have rapidly aging populations who want to remain in homes and communities of their choice. Concurrently, seniors face vulnerabilities associated with low income, ageism, social isolation and loneliness. These vulnerabilities inhibit many seniors’ desires to age-in-place. The Toronto HomeShare Program, an intergenerational homesharing program facilitates aging-in-place by matching seniors with post-secondary students. The program, with an implementation focus and a research study, was developed to address and understand the needs of seniors seeking assistance, light supports and companionship at home, in exchange for reduced-rent housing for students. A mixed methods research design was employed. Seniors and students (n=22) completed a 167 question survey (n=22) and in-depth interviews (n=18). Quantitative data yielded descriptive statistics and qualitative data was subject to thematic content analysis. Participants agreed that homesharing programs could address risk for social isolation (95%), the need to move from their community (96%), and reduce risks of economic and social exclusion for young and old (97%). From the qualitative data, six benefits were apparent for all participants: (1) reduced social isolation and loneliness, (2) increased intergenerational exchange, (3) increase financial security, (4) household assistance, (5) increased general wellbeing; (6) enhanced companionship/safety. In 2020, Toronto HomeShare (now Canada HomeShare) was recognized by the World Health Organization as an age-friendly best practice, and has been scaled nationally in 16 cities. Intergenerational homesharing programs could be a catalyst for policy and cultural reform and to support older adults to not only remain in their communities, but to thrive-in-place.

Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard

Chapter 4 narrates the life and public reform of Frances Willard. A female public speaker and writer, Willard took on the cult of domesticity and the strict gender roles enforced in the American Industrial Age. Facing gender inequality, Willard fought for women’s rights and social reform, serving as the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. In addition to describing Willard’s life, this chapter examines the use of her public platform and the authority of her public rhetoric to influence the lives of women seeking equal opportunities. Analyzing her narrative of cultural reform in her two books, How to Win: A Book for Girls and Woman in the Pulpit, this chapter explores the rhetorical tactics Willard used to effectively argue for equality and egalitarianism for women in church and society.

Florence Spearing Randolph

Chapter 6 surveys the life and pastoral ministry of Florence Spearing Randolph. As a black female preacher, Randolph faced issues of gender and racial inequality throughout her life in southern and northern states as she sought to advocate for reform of the extreme class divisions of the Gilded Age. As a proponent of the Social Gospel movement and an ordained and installed minister, she joined scripture with cultural reform for impactful messages. Through an analysis of her sermons, including Antipathy to Women Preachers and Looking Backward and Forward, this chapter investigates her perspective on gender roles, women’s ordination, and race relations. This chapter considers her call narrative and her use of pulpit rhetoric in communicating her position as a minister within the black church, summoning women to answer their call to preach as ordained ministers and claim the power of the pulpit.

Folk dance as a tool of socialist propaganda based on Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War

The article addressed the issue of using folk dance as a tool of propaganda by the communist party. It is not uncommon to associate the activity of folk groups with the period of socialist realism and the years that followed in. Folk song and dance ensembles have always been a colorful showcase of the country outside of its borders and have often added splendor to distinguished national events with their performances. Nevertheless, their artistic activity was not motivated solely by the beauty of Polish folklore, for folk ensembles formed after World War II were often created to aid the goals of the communist party. Reaching for folk repertoire and transferring regional songs and dances to the stage was seen as opposition to the elite culture. Cultural reform made performances accessible to the working class, and folk song and dance expressed admiration for the work of people in the countryside. In addition to traditional songs from various regions of Poland, the repertoire of these ensembles also included many songs in honor of Stalin and about the Polish-Soviet friendship. Paweł Pawlikowski’s award-winning film, Cold War, which partially follows a song and dance ensemble (aptly named Mazurek), shows many of the dilemmas and controversies that the artists of this period had to face.

An equality narrative

This chapter examines an equality narrative of democracy that was drawn on within some networks of activists, and which was largely a reaction against the benevolence narrative described in the previous chapter. This narrative has three components – the core challenge of hierarchy within Burmese society, a vision of personal or relational equality and a strategy of cultural reform. Proponents of this narrative saw the emphasis on values of unity and obligation within the benevolence narrative, and the implicit hierarchies that these values create, as deeply problematic for the country’s democratisation.

The Jewish Contribution to Civilization Discourse: An Egyptian-Jewish Appropriation in the 1940s

The idea of the Jewish contribution to civilization is generally understood as a Western counter-discourse that, often expressed in response to anti-Semitism, aims to change attitudes towards Jews. My examination of the appropriation of this idea by the Egyptian-Jewish writer Alfred Yallouz in the early 1940s proposes that he embedded it in his national and regional politics of Jewish cultural reform. Here, it served the aim of promoting Jewish belonging to Arab society by addressing historical Jewish contributions to Arab culture, and connecting these to Arab-Jewish relations in the present.

Canonising Shakespeare in 1920s Japan

In 1927, just before completing the first Japanese translation of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935) selected eight of his translations for inclusion in his own Selected Works, which were published in fifteen volumes in conclusion to his career as one of the leading exponents of cultural reform of his generation. His choice is idiosyncratic as it omits the plays that had become most popular during the period of Shakespeare’s initial reception in late nineteenth-century Japan, but includes a number that were relatively unknown, such as Measure for Measure. This article suggests likely reasons for his selection before discussing the comments he makes on each play in his translation prefaces, and thus provides an overview of what Tsubouchi had come to value about Shakespeare.

Introduction

In addition to providing an overview of the existing scholarship on the Muslims and Turks in Bulgaria, the introduction presents the subject of this book. The book follows the history of the Muslims in Bulgaria (mostly Turks but also Pomaks, Tatars, and Roma) in the first crucial decades after the establishment of modern Bulgaria on former Ottoman territories. More specifically, it focuses on the activities of a movement for cultural reform and its efforts to reshape local Muslim society, a phenomenon neglected by scholarship so far. The book seeks to bring out the history of Bulgaria’s Muslims from the confines of “minority studies,” and put it in a new framework of inquiry, while underscoring how the community also remained a part of the Ottoman world.

Between Empire and Nation

This book tells the story of the Muslim community in modern Bulgaria during a period of imperial dissolution, conflicting national and imperial enterprises, and the emergence of new national and ethnic identities. Following the Ottoman-Russian war of 1877-1878 that paved the way for Bulgarian independence, a movement for cultural reform and political mobilization gained momentum within Bulgaria’s sizable Muslim population. From the establishment of the Bulgarian state in 1878 until the 1908 Young Turk revolution, this reform movement emerged as part of a struggle to redefine Muslim collective identity without severing ties to the Ottomans, during a period when Muslims were losing faith in the Sultan, while also fearing Young Turk secularism. This book draws on both Ottoman and Eastern European historiographies, and approaches the question of Balkan Muslims’ engagement with modernity through a transnational lens, demonstrating how Bulgarian Muslims debated similar questions as Muslims elsewhere around the world. This book situates the Bulgarian story within a global narrative of Muslim political and cultural reform movements, analyzes how Muslims understood and conceptualized “Europe,” and reveals the centrality of the Bulgarian Muslims to the Young Turk Revolution. Milena Methodieva makes a compelling case for how the experience of a Muslim minority provides new insight into the nature of nationalism, citizenship, and state formation.