Storying Life Courses for Intersectional Inclusion: Ethnicity and Wellbeing Across Time and Place, 2022-2025

Kilkey, Majella (2026). Storying Life Courses for Intersectional Inclusion: Ethnicity and Wellbeing Across Time and Place, 2022-2025. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-858314

The current prominence of the Black Lives Matter Movement, along with evidence of the unequal morbidity, mortality and socio-economic impacts of Covid-19, have highlighted the entrenched and systemic ethnic and racialised inequalities in UK society. These have a detrimental impact on older members of racially minoritised communities, as well as on its younger members. Indeed, the two are inseparable, as racialised experiences of inequality and exclusion encountered in earlier years, accumulate over the life course, resulting in significant ethnic inequalities in later life across a range of social outcomes.

Research and policy agendas designed to foster more inclusive ageing scenarios for the population at large have gained traction in recent years, albeit against a backdrop of prevailing societal ageism as a system of inequality and a major form of exclusion. Such agendas have increasingly acknowledged the importance of a life course perspective for inclusive ageing, understanding later-life positionings as cumulative of advantage and disadvantage over time. Older people’s life courses, however, have been treated in quite homogenised ways. This means that in prevailing conceptualisations of inclusive ageing, vital intersections between ageing and ethnicity, and between ageism and racism, have been missed.

This timely and bold project plugs that fundamental knowledge gap. Its key aim is to critically interrogate accepted interpretations of social inclusion/exclusion in order to reconceptualise them from the perspective of the racially minoritised people's life courses, and to employ this reconceptualisation as the basis for a new understanding of inclusive ageing and the steps needed to achieve it. As with the older population, the racially minoritised population is diverse in itself, with dynamic and multidimensional identities and experiences mediated by for example, gender, socio-economic position, migration background, sexuality, religion and disability. In this project, therefore, we take an ‘intersectional life course’ approach, unpacking experiences within racially minoritised populations. We also focus on the important role that place plays in shaping intersectional life course experiences. This includes the material resources available in local places, such as housing and social care, as well as the sense of attachment, belonging and identity places engender or not. For those with a migration background, place is likely to be multi-sited, with experiences in the place of residence produced and re-produced in relation to places elsewhere.

Data description (abstract)

This change-oriented project aimed to transform both understanding of inclusive ageing, and the prospects for new policy and practice approaches to achieve it. It was a timely and bold interdisciplinary effort to push the boundaries of knowledge, methods and policy and practice regarding racially minoritised populations and the potential for their greater inclusion.

The project's objectives were to:

1. To work in partnership with racially minoritised communities and other key stakeholders to critically interrogate dominant understandings of social inclusion/exclusion in order to re-imagine and reconceptualise them from this specific grounded perspective.

2. To develop creative, inclusive and adaptive approaches to research, dissemination and impact, so as to centre the lived experiences of racially minoritised communities as a strategy of recognising experiences that have been devalued and ignored in ageing research, policy and practice.

3. To work across disciplinary boundaries, adopting an intersectional life course approach and innovative methods, to develop new understandings of the causes of ethnic inequalities in social inclusion / exclusion and levels of wellbeing in later-life, including their place-based dynamics. This will involve exploiting the potential of existing datasets and administrative data linkages (in collaboration with our Co-I, the Office of National Statistics), as well as the production of new data to develop a contextualised and nuanced understanding of intersectional life course inclusions / exclusions. We will use the Open Science Framework to facilitate future exploitation of the project data by policymakers and other researchers.

4. To co-produce with key stakeholders, including racially minoritised communities older people, creative steps for policy and practice interventions at micro, meso and macro levels to prevent the risk of exclusion and promote inclusive ageing.

5. To build capacity across the whole project team - Co-Is (academic, third-sector and government), Researchers, Project Partners, Community Researchers and Voice Forum members - through a bespoke programme of knowledge exchange, skills training and personal development, with an emphasis on furnishing opportunities for mutual learning across disciplines and sectors.

New data collection happened in Rotherham and Sheffield between 2023 and 2025, and included life history interviews, go-along interviews and participatory arts-based workshops.

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