Book Talk | Guillermina Altomonte | Chasing Independence: Growing Old in the Shadow of an American Ideal
Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Monday, November 16 (5:30-7:00 PM) for an event with Guillermina Altomonte. She will discuss her book, Chasing Independence: Growing Old in the Shadow of an American Ideal, with Premilla Nadasen and Tina Sadarangani.
Guillermina Altomonte is an assistant professor of sociology at New York University who works on topics related to healthcare, culture, markets, and aging. Her book, Chasing Independence: Growing Old in the Shadow of an American Ideal, examines how the value of independence defines cultural expectations, medical interventions, and policy for aging and elder care in the United States. You can read articles from this project in the American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, and Social Science & Medicine. Her research examines the new economy of health sharing platforms using interviews and digital ethnography. Altomonte received her PhD in 2020 from The New School for Social Research; previously, she worked as a journalist in Chile, where she grew up.
Premilla Nadasen is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University, and past president of the National Women’s Studies Association. She has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grass-roots community organizing and is most interested in visions of social change and poor and working-class women of color who fought for economic justice. Her most recent book, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (2023), examines profit extraction from the care economy as well as models of grassroots radical care that sit outside capitalism. She is also the author of two award-winning books, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement and Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States. She is currently writing a biography of South African performer, Black Power advocate, and anti-apartheid icon Miriam Makeba. Nadasen has a long history of activism around economic justice, gender justice, apartheid, and labor rights. In 2023 she was named a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar for her activist and scholarly contributions.
Tina Sadarangani is an Assistant Professor at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing and a board-certified adult and geriatric nurse practitioner. Sadarangani is an NIH-funded clinician scientist over-seeing a research portfolio focused on improving care for people with Alzheimer’s disease and their families. Sadarangani’s expertise includes family caregivers, adult day care services, older adult nutrition, age-tech, and addressing the long-term care needs of ethnically diverse older adults. With support from the National Institutes of Health, Sadarangani created an award-winning mobile app– CareMobiTM – out of her NYU lab that helps family members caring for a chronically ill loved one, particularly those with dementia, communicate around the day-to-day care of their loved ones. She is also the creator of The Enlightened Caregiver – a social media movement – that empowers families with practical guidance on how to get optimal, not usual, healthcare for the people they love. Her research also innovatively positions adult day centers, which represent a growing but understudied sector of long-term care, as platforms for chronic disease management in underserved communities. A leader in using community-partnered research in adult day centers, her on-going collaborations with the National Adult Day Services Association and the California Association of Adult Day Services, have demonstrated that integrating adult day centers into the healthcare continuum contributes to reductions in avoidable healthcare utilization and person-centered care. Sadarangani has published extensively in peer-reviewed academic journals, including in the American Journal of Public Health and the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.