Ala Jamal Zareini

Research and development areas

PhD fellow at the Department of Anthropology at The University of Copenhagen and The Department of Nursing and Nutrition at the University College Copenhagen.

At the center of my work as an anthropologist lies the commitment to providing impactful knowledge that can significantly benefit people, especially within the social and healthcare sectors. My work has centred on research and evaluations of social and health-promoting interventions among citizens with mental illness, citizens with refugee backgrounds, welfare professionals, relatives to patients, and administrative staff.

In my PhD project I investigate how care workers, elderly Danes, next of kin and volunteers, in cooperation with each other practice good care in a time of mounting pressure and challenges in Danish elder care. Based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a nursing home and a homecare unit in Copenhagen I explore how these challenges faced by Danish elder care poses an ethical demand that is generating organisational, solidaric and relational responses in practice. It is crucial that, in light of the demographic, social, and economic changes in the Danish welfare state, we address how these changes affect and reshape care in Denmark.