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Sharing Conversations - A Core Human Experience Across Life

 Promoting the inclusion of people with diverse conditions through sharing conversations.

Sharing Conversations: A core human experience across life grapples with the long-standing concern of aging and the challenge to maintain human dignity as one grows older. While aging is frequently discussed from medical, economic, and technological perspectives, this project seeks to highlight the significance of human interaction – through sharing conversations – and illustrate that conversation represents a core human experience for individuals and communities.

 

We aim to illustrate that language usage is fundamental to conversations throughout one’s lifespan using detailed linguistic and narrative analyses of interactions. We also seek to engage researchers and the public in dialogue about how the broader community can include elders with diverse conditions.

Our current focus is our Haiku Project, which aims to promote conversations among people in different generations to help promote creativity in verbal art and communication.

Sharing Conversations is one of the six projects funded by Stanford University's Changing Human Experience (CHE) Long-Range Initiative.

Sharing Conversations

Haiku Project

Haiku, a short form of poetry originating in Japan, evokes a simple yet emotive image, traditionally of a season. We conducted small-group intergenerational haiku activities online at the height of the pandemic, later transitioning to an in-person model when it became possible. In these haiku-making studies, older adults and university students gather to create haiku poetry together.

Haiku Project

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