Joshua Hotaka Roth — Life Lines: Art, Memory, Relationship - with Mark Auslander

Life Lines is an ethnographic exploration of elder care as a creative and relational process, centred on the author's journey caring for his aging father. Over five years, these shared moments opened up new understandings of his father's inner world, revealing the social and personal forces that shaped his life, dreams, and disappointments.Blending personal narrative with ethnographic insight, Life Lines invites readers to reflect on the profound and often challenging journey of caring for an aging parent. As generations age and more families navigate the realities of advanced old age, this book offers a hopeful vision: caregiving can be more than a duty - it can become an opportunity for parents and adult children to forge deeper, more emotionally enriching relationships.Through art, conversation, and shared discovery, Life Lines shows how we can move beyond care fatigue and disconnection, transforming the later years of life into a time of renewed connection, understanding, and appreciation.Joshua Hotaka Roth is Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies at Mount Holyoke College, author of the award-winning Brokered Homeland, and a leading scholar on migration, mobility, and aging in Japan.Hotaka Roth is in conversation with Mark Auslander, PhD, a sociocultural and historical anthropologist, who currently teaches at American University in Washington DC.  He has published extensively on art, ritual, race, and the politics of difference. He is author of the award-wining book, “The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family” (University of Georgia Press, 2011) and co-editor with Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston of "In Search of Lost Futures: Anthropological Explorations in Multimodality, Deep Interdisciplinarity, and Autoethnography” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).  Mark has served as a curator and museum director, with emphases on natural  science, cultural history, expressive arts, and community engagement. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781487562830?ic_referral=if_sNCiMNjo-9KoUFuLfNKpcNO-Ma6j_4z88HhuXBBgwM2Vezv30ptnpLoAj2Np7gJCODX-M2Zo6TtJ39SDCXWj9N9YJFFOUlVcZj2sccem3JnCelFpGGgij_RMe3GiYhrd5fAY