Ph.d.-projektet En upåagtet verden af bevægelse - et etnografisk studie af hverdagsliv blandt ...

332 Pages·2017·7.83 MB·Danish

by  Jon Dag Rasmussen

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EN UPÅAGTET VERDEN AF BEVÆGELSE
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EN UPÅAGTET VERDEN AF BEVÆGELSE
ET ETNOGRAFISK STUDIE AF HVERDAGSLIV BLANDT
USÆDVANLIGE ÆLDRE MENNESKER I STORBYEN
af
Jon Dag Rasmussen

Afhandling indleveret december 2016

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Ph.d. indleveret: December 2016
Ph.d. vejleder: Professor Michael Hviid Jacobsen,
Institut for Sociologi og Socialt Arbejde
Aalborg Universitet
Ph.d. bi-vejledere: Ph.d., direktør Christine E. Swane,
Ensomme Gamles Værn
Lektor Ida Wentzel Winther,
Danmarks Institut for Pædagogik & Uddannelse
Aarhus Universitet
Ph.d. bedømmelsesudvalg: Lektor Anja Jørgensen (formand)
Aalborg Universitet
Lektor Bjarke Oxlund
Københavns Universitet
Professor Dag Album
UiO
Ph.d. serie: Det Samfundsvidenskabelige Fakultet,
Aalborg Universitet
ISSN (online): 2246-1256
ISBN (online): 978-87-7112-854-3
Udgivet af:
Aalborg Universitetsforlag
Skjernvej 4A, 2. sal
9220 Aalborg Ø
Tlf. 9940 7140
[email protected]
forlag.aau.dk
© Copyright: Jon Dag Rasmussen
Trykt i Danmark af Rosendahls, 2017
Normalsider: 316 sider (á 2.400 anslag inkl. mellemrum).
CV
Jon Dag Rasmussen er kandidat i pædagogisk antropologi fra Danmarks
Pædagogiske Universitetsskole under Århus Universitet i 2010. Han blev
efterfølgende ansat som videnskabelig medarbejder i den forskningsorienterede
humanitære fond, Ensomme Gamles Værn, hvor han har udført to kvalitative
forskningsprojekter baseret på etnografisk metode. Begge disse arbejder er
publiceret i fondens udgivelsesrække.
I forlængelse af det ene forskningsprojekt (publiceret som ”Steder at være for
socialt udsatte ældre”) blev han indskrevet som ph.d.-stipendiat ved Aalborg
Universitet i december 2012. Jons ansættelse ved AAU har indeholdt
præsentation af hans arbejde på fx 22nd Nordic Congress of Gerontology, på
konferencen Networked Urban Mobilities, som blev afholdt af det internationale
Cosmobilities Network, og på 33 Nordic Ethnology and Folklore Conference. Jon
har varetaget undervisning på Aalborg Universitets kandidatuddannelser i såvel
Aalborg som i København, og har under ansættelsen fungeret som
specialevejleder og censor. Hans forskning har givet mulighed for en række
foredrag som er afholdt rundt omkring i landet, og i perioden har han desuden
været tilknyttet som underviser og foredragsholder på Professionshøjskolen UCC
i København. Jons forskning er løbende publiceret som tidsskriftartikler og i form
af forskellige kapitelbidrag. Ansættelsesperioden ved AAU har indeholdt en
barselsorlov (søn født januar 2013).
På et bredere felt er Jon optaget af at bringe konventionelt adskilte områder som
litteratur, kunst, filosofi og samfundsvidenskabelig forskning sammen med det
mål, at afsøge de gensidigt berigende perspektiver, der udgør disse traditioner og
udtryks fælles genstandsfelt: en undersøgelse af, og refleksion over, det værende.
To af de store samfundsvidenskabelige forskningsinteresser som løber gennem
Jons arbejde består i studiet af hverdagsliv og optagetheden af forskellige former
for social forankring i den foreliggende verden. Disse interesser er kombineret i
det projekt som her foreligger.
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ENGLISH SUMMARY
Unnoticed worlds of mobility: An ethnographic study of everyday life amongst
unconventional older city people

There are many people passing through the currents of everyday life of whom we
know close to nothing. Quiet and transparent beings that will first appear once we
acquire a gaze that allows them to emerge. The city is rich of such existences that
fuse into a landscape always teeming with people, animals and objects.

With this PhD-dissertation a phenomenon of such stale character is presented as
a hidden world of unusual and unnoticed older lives are brought to attention. Lives
that branch off small apartments in the morning to be found circulating the city
sphere throughout the day and into the night. Older people that carve entangled
and spidery patterns into the world while making their way through the everyday
life. The work explores everyday lives that do not figure in existing research, that
are shunned from political attention – lives that are highly inaccessible.

The explored phenomenon falls between several established fields of research
since the followed group of older persons are not subject to Danish gerontological
inquiry, as research within the field of homelessness is pointed towards younger
persons, and because endeavors towards social and economic marginalization aim
too broadly to detect these subtle and unnoticed lives. This dissertation comprises
a scientific contribution as well as a new footing in this narrow field and the work
proposes a vocabulary adequate in addressing unnoticed and unusual lives among
urban older persons under the surface of society.

The work rests on years of ethnographic work and participation amongst older
people who live and die the city. Unconventional people are followed as they
frequent street corners, park sites, drop-by centers, shelters, bars, charitable
organizations, secondhand stores amongst a variety of other places that constitute
a structure of informal social institutions throughout the public sphere. Through
the application of a highly mobile and persistent participant observation detailed
empirical insights into an unusual social life that span across and weave together
multiple contexts in the city have been produced.

My work is based on a theoretical framework consisting of sociologies of the
everyday life and a tradition of urban ethnography. Throughout the thesis I draw
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EN UPÅAGTET VERDEN AF BEVÆGELSE
on inspiration from the linealogy of Tim Ingold. The analysis is carried out as an
empirically close and descriptive effort as concepts and ideas from fields as
sociology, anthropology, literature and philosophy is applied in the aim of
attaining an analytical dialogue based on theoretical perspectivism. Analytical
concepts are developed through the analysis in an ambition to qualify the
reflection of the studied everyday life and the dissertation is carried out in a
phenomenological inspired style of writing.

The analytical work unveils how the primary social and existential entrenchment
amongst the older people are created through small scale mobility practices and
various stops in the city landscape, as well as the social logics and premises
characteristic of life in the studied contexts. The work reflects how the elderly
informants hold significant relationships to various non-human elements in the
city sphere; how animal creatures, artifacts and composite objects are of central
importance to everyday life. An intricate system of material and non-material
trade and exchange based-relations is subjected to reflection and the analysis
illustrates how various transactions tie together an extensive field of people,
unnoticed communities and places throughout the city. Finally, the empirically
ever present phenomenon of death among the informants is subject to analysis.
Building on empirical and thick description it is shown how growing old in the
margins of society involve outlasting numerous and multiple relational loses.

The dissertation presents detailed and empirically based insights into everyday
life among older persons who inhabit a highly unnoticed and inaccessible
borderland in the city as in society at large. It unveils how the followed older
people stretch their lives into the urban realm, how these people deeply affected
by phenomena like loneliness, poverty, isolation, personal and social difficulties
– conditions and terms that frame the everyday in both substantial and radical
manners – find their ways through the world. The work brings forth empirically
based insights in a series of these hidden-away, unnoticed and wondrous
everyday lives as they are practiced and moved through the Danish capital of
Copenhagen in the first part of the 21th century. The analysis unveils how the
city sphere render itself usable as a needed, spacious and far more adequate
room for existence amongst the elderly, as their housing facilities and the
isolation that characterize these conventional residences rejects them; forces
movement and small scale mobility upon the everyday. The mobile practices
shared among all the followed informants stand out as tactics towards the
achievement of a significant social entrenchment and continuity in life. And the

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work presented with the dissertation elucidate and bring forth an immense and
unnoticed meshwork of unusual elderly people weaving together unnoticed
social worlds across Copenhagen. It illustrates how significant social, near-
social and more-than-human relationships are constituted, maintained and

dissolved.
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