Pedagogical anthropologist Jon Dag Rasmussen’s PhD dissertation offers detailed and empirically-based insight into the everyday lives of unconventional older people who move in unnoticed urban worlds and are difficult to reach.

The EGV Foundation has initiated two PhD projects about older adults in Denmark with low income. One project focuses on the socially vulnerable, the other on older people whose only income is state pension.

The PhD project about socially vulnerable older adults was carried out by Jon Dag Rasmussen at Aalborg University, Department of Sociology and Social Work. Jon Dag Rasmussen has a Master in Educational Anthropology and is a former academic staff member at the EGV Foundation. The project began in late 2012, the dissertation was completed in 2017.

Professor Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Aalborg University, was the principal supervisor, Christine E. Swane, the EGV Foundation (director), and Ida Wentzel Winther (associate professor), Aarhus University, were co-supervisors.

The following is a revised excerpt from the Danish summary printed in the dissertation.

The dissertation offers detailed and empirically-based insights into the daily lives of older individuals who inhabit an unnoticed and inaccessible borderland in the city and in society in general. These elderly people are people of a special nature and are afflicted by loneliness, poverty, isolation, personal and social difficulties – each condition taking its toll on everyday life in more ways than one. They navigate through life on these terms. 

The analysis unveils how the city sphere (public urban spaces) offers a much-needed, spacious and far more accommodating space for the elderly, as their housing facilities and the isolation that characterizes conventional housing reject them and force the movement in their daily lives. The practices of the project informants stand out as tactics aimed at achieving stability, a sense of security, social entrenchment and continuity.

The dissertation sheds light on an extensive, yet unnoticed type of network which connects unconventional elderly people all over Copenhagen, and illustrates how social, near-social and more-than-human relationships are formed, sustained and dissolved.

Funding: DKK 1.119.000 from the EGV Foundation co-funding with Aalborg University.