Loa Kristine Teglgaard Christensen defends her PhD thesis at Department of Anthropology

Candidate: Loa Kristine Teglgaard Christensen

Title: ‘Crafting Valued Old Lives. Quandaries in Danish Home Care'.

Assessment Committee:

• Professor (MSO), Ayo Wahlberg
  University of Copenhagen, Denmark (chair)
• Senior Researcher Lone Grøn
  VIVE - Danish Center for Social Research Science, Denmark
• Senior Lecturer Jason Danely
  Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdom

Host:
Head of Department, Professor (MSO), Bjarke Oxlund.

Time and venue:
Time: 15 May 2020, 14:00 (The defence is scheduled to last a maximum of 3 hours)

Summary: Drawing on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork among home-care recipients and their professional caregivers in the Danish municipality of Vordingborg, this dissertation addresses the ways that people actively work to enable valued lives in everyday home-care encounters. The background of the study is an accelerated shift in focus in public home care provision from ‘passive’ to ‘active’ care, marked particularly by the implementation of an intervention program referred to as everyday rehabilitation (hverdagsrehabilitering).

The dissertation argues that precisely what constitutes a good life towards the end of the life course and what kind of care it takes to achieve it cannot be easily conceptualised. Rather, multiple versions of what a valued life amounts to co-exist, and hence the crafting of valued old lives entails a continual negotiation and balancing of values in the everyday encounters between policy, professional caregivers and home-care recipients. Despite good intentions and all the work done to enable lives that are worth living, tensions, dilemmas and unforeseen consequences inevitably arise. The dissertation engages with these dilemmas and the ambiguous care encounters and relationships they produce.