ElderWare: Story Work and Aging in the mid-21st Century

Episode 21 - Xanthe Golenko on Intergenerational Care in Australia

My guest is Xanthe Golenko, an Australian researcher, practitioner, and now storytelling facilitator based in France. Xanthe came to this work through an unlikely path — nine years as a professional dancer, a detour into business and healthcare research, a PhD in organizational culture in public hospitals, and then a fateful introduction to intergenerational practice that, as she puts it, just hooked her. What she witnessed — the bonds, the joy, the transformation in people who had been reduced to a diagnosis or a room number — changed the direction of her professional life.

Episode 20 - Pia Kontos

Dr. Pia Kontos is a senior scientist at the KITE Research Institute at the University of Toronto, and her life's work is challenging the idea that dementia means the self is gone. Drawing on embodiment theory, she argues that agency, humor, creativity, and relationship persist through the body even in severe cognitive impairment — and she builds the evidence for that argument through documentary film, research-based theater, and dance programs that put people living with dementia at the center of their own stories.

Episode 20 - Pia Kontos

Dr. Pia Kontos is a senior scientist at the KITE Research Institute at the University of Toronto, and her life's work is challenging the idea that dementia means the self is gone. Drawing on embodiment theory, she argues that agency, humor, creativity, and relationship persist through the body even in severe cognitive impairment — and she builds the evidence for that argument through documentary film, research-based theater, and dance programs that put people living with dementia at the center of their own stories.

Episode 19 - Kinde Nebeker

Kinde Nebeker is a rites of passage guide based in Castle Valley, Utah — out near Moab, which is about as magic a piece of geography as this earth has to offer. She trained in transpersonal psychology at Naropa University, and has spent decades guiding people through vision fasts rooted in indigenous ceremony, stripped of cultural appropriation, but full of the original medicine: solitude, fasting, land, story, and deep listening. This conversation went places I didn't expect. It usually does when someone knows what they're talking about.

Episode 18 - Lindsey Beagley - University-based Retirement Communities

Lindsay Beagley is the Senior Director of Lifelong University Engagement at Arizona State University, and she's been quietly dismantling that model from the inside. Her work centers on Mirabella at ASU — a continuing care retirement community built right on the Tempe campus — where residents take classes, mentor students, advise startups, and participate in the full life of the university. Not as guests. As members. But Lindsay's story goes back further than Mirabella — back to a Peace Corps posting in Honduras, where she encountered something most Americans have never experienced: a society where older people were simply... present. This is a conversation about what we lost, and what it might look like to build it back.