{"product_id":"randias-quiet-theatre-performing-care-and-activism-with-a-romani-elder-9780228024781","title":"Randia's Quiet Theatre: Performing Care and Activism with a Romani Elder","description":"Throughout Poland, tens of thousands of elderly people live with disabilities in four-storey walk-up apartment buildings. In many cases their children have emigrated; they live with loneliness, a lack of basic amenities, silence, and the absence of care. They are known as \"prisoners of the fourth floor.\" In Randia's Quiet Theatre Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston mixes autofiction, ethnography, and theatrical improvisation to unravel the politics of aging in Poland. At the centre of the book is Randia, a Romani fortune teller, storyteller, and performer confined to her fourth-floor apartment in old age. In interviews, Randia's identity is fixed: she tells of the hardships she faced as a Romani girl and as a wife, mother, and grandmother whose relationship with her family was shaped by separation, sickness, and death. But in storytelling sessions staged in her home, Randia steps into characters and is freed: her tales move between the past, the present, and the future, across life and death; her characters look after one another and change history. Kazubowski-Houston finds in Randia's performances a quiet activism through which she envisages alternative lives and articulates an ethics of care among individuals, communities, and spirits. Interwoven throughout Randia's Quiet Theatre are Kazubowski-Houston's own stories about caring for her elderly and disabled mother, making the book a collaborative, reflexive, and complex creative work. It reveals how ethnographers and their interlocutors can stand on more equal ground. Ultimately it is a profound reflection on how the elderly can live with dignity and how we can care for each other.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMagdalena Kazubowski-Houston is associate professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance \u0026amp; Performance at York University and the author of Staging Strife: Lessons from Performing Ethnography with Polish Roma Women.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"McGill-Queen's University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51359184584978,"sku":"9780228024781","price":34.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_7faa3967-425e-46e9-9932-646ea17ed7cd.jpg?v=1749584287","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/randias-quiet-theatre-performing-care-and-activism-with-a-romani-elder-9780228024781","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}