2010 Trudeau Scholar

emilie.raymond@trudeaufoundation.net

Current Research

Biography

Émiliy Raymond's itinerary as citizen, community organizer and researcher has been guided by her will to bring together all of her activities towards the goal of building a fairer society. Since the beginning of her academic and professional career, where she merged social work, anthropology and critical scholarship, she has taken an interest in several topics: the conditions and challenges of microcredit programs for women in Senegal (Bachelor in Social Service from the Université Laval); the design of an alternative working model for illiterate people in Quebec (Masters in Social Service from the Université Laval); and the transformations of family lifestyles in Chile and the implication of these changes for women (Masters in Anthropology and Development from the Universidad de Chile). For each of these degrees, her goal was developing participatory research practices that combined research and social justice concerns. The question "What is the usefulness of your research?", frequently asked by people whose paths she crossed along the way, still invites her to value an engaged, dialogical and self-reflexive standpoint.

Her work about the citizen participation of older people, initated within her job as researcher for the National Institute of Public Health, does not disrupt this participatory research approach. Her interest in the topic is rooted in a number of experience and reflections. First among them is her relationship to several older people, a life narratives project that she undertook with a group of Chiliean seniors living in situations of social exclusion, as finally her own reflections about social inequalities and the human life cycle. She feels particularly captivated by the paradoxes that coexist when we talk about older people and demographic ageing: issues that seem so present and at the same time so easy to ignore. For instance, public discourses insist on the importance of the social participation of older people; yet, their voices are poorly heard in the decision-making spaces over what this might mean. Another example is linked to the policy agenda that concerns successful, active, or productive ageing, a perspective that could appear positive, but that also stigmatise the situation of older people who can not (or do not want to) foresee and live their old age in this way, among these groups are especially the disabled or economically disadvantaged older people. What is at sake here is to go beyond the taken-for granted ideas that shape seniors' participation, and in doing this, to identify the conditions of an authentic citizen participation in terms of social policy and activism.

Project Description

Citizen Participation among Seniors: Considering the Intersection of Public Policy and Social Movements

Her doctoral research gives her the opportunity to study questions which, if they primarily concern the citizen participation of older people, can not be separated from our collective "living-together" and from the transformation of public governance. Her thesis allows her to work in a collaborative way with social movements of older people and to observe how citizen participation is perceived and put in practice there, while, at the same time, comparing these experiences with an analysis of public policy that aimes at encouraging participative behaviours among seniors. Engaging in a back-and-forth process between fieldwork and policy, she will build up a mixed methodological that combinates ethnology and discourse analysis. 

Along the way, she wishes to: develop knowledge regarding the history of older people's social movement in Quebec, as well the challenges they are currently facing; understand better the rapport between these movement and the state; support the efforts of seniors' associations in defending and promoting the rights of the groups they represent from a perspective of social solidarity; and finally, contribute to public policy in the areas of ageing and/or participation so that these policies that are both conceptually critical and pragmatically progressive.

Trudeau Foundation Themes

Responsible citizenship