Hosts Cecil Prescod and Celeste Carey interview writer and cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson about her new book, Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom, on the contributions and improvisations of engaged older adults, written to raise consciousness of the changing life cycle and to encourage older adults to claim a voice for the future.
Mary Catherine Bateson has written and co-authored many books and articles, and lectures across the country and abroad and has taught at Harvard, Northeastern University, Amherst College, Spelman College and abroad in the Philippines and in Iran. In 2004 she retired from her position as Clarence J. Robinson Professor in Anthropology and English at George Mason University, and is now Professor Emerita. Since the Fall of 2006 she has been a Visiting Scholar at the Center on Aging & Work/Workplace Flexibility at Boston College and is a special consultant to the Lifelong Access Libraries Initiative of the Libraries for the Future, with an emphasis on conceptualization, testing and implementation of her Active Wisdom model for community dialogues as a signature program of the Initiative. She serves on multiple advisory boards including that of the National Center on Atmospheric Research and the NSF, dealing with climate change.
Ms Bateson has recently concluded thirty years as president of the Institute for Intercultural Studies in New York City, dissolving the Institute and arranging for ongoing stewardship of the literary rights of her parents and many of their colleagues. Her books in print include Composing a Life, Our Own Metaphor, and Peripheral Visions, as well as a memoir, With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.