Short Abstract:

The laboratory is a workshop where participants make jigsaw puzzles of old age and care out of empirical pieces from selected projects in an interdisciplinary research group. The pictures are discussed with links to themes of fieldwork, representation and cross disciplinary collaborations.

Long Abstract:

In Center for Healthy Aging, University of Copenhagen an interdisciplinary and cross institutional research group explores various aspects of everyday life perspectives of elderly people as well of various aspects of professional care and planning in the area of old age care. One of the projects called 'Retirement Stories' is a combined research and dissemination project experimenting with different formats of representation and dialogue with research participants and audiences going on during the period of fieldwork and thus being part of it.

Inspired by these experiences this laboratory is an attempt to continue the development of experiments including other research projects from the research group. The laboratory session is a workshop building on empirical material from selected projects covering various focus points such as retirement, community health initiatives, rehabilitation and the use of welfare technology in old age care. The participants in the workshop are invited to create 'images' from quotes and photographs deriving from the different projects and fields like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. The different pictures and the reasoning behind them will hopefully lead to discussions of aging, care, societal development and responsibilities as well as methodological discussions about fieldwork, representations and collaborative work with different researchers as well as with practitioners and planners in the public sector.