Anthropology professor Jeanne Shea was awarded this years Peter J. Seybolt Award to conduct ethnographic research on long-term care community cooperatives in China. In this emerging care alternative, healthy retirees from the community volunteer to provide daily care to an infirm elderly neighbor. In return for their service, when the retirees need caregiving later on life, another healthy elder steps up to the plate. The government is promoting this model in its quiver of innovative approaches to the growing crisis of care in China in which families, working-age adults, and government services are no longer insufficient to support the needs of the rapidly aging population. Jeanne will conduct participant observation and interviews with elderly volunteers and gerontology experts in rural and urban settings in China during the month of May following a conference on Caregiving the Elderly in Asia in Hong Kong. The Peter J. Seybolt Award is a competitive award for faculty research in Asia. The annual award was formed in memory of Professor Seybolt, scholar of Chinese and Japanese history and Director of the Asian Studies Program at UVM for nearly four decades.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 27th, 2014 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.