Loretta Platts

Loretta Platts will dedicate her fellowship year to studying the nature of jobs that people hold after reaching pensionable age. Working pensioners, receiving a substantial universal basic income in the form of an old-age pension, defy cultural expectations that call on them to step back from paid work and embrace retirement lifestyles. They are a growing group in the United States and in some other advanced economies, yet little is known about them. This empirical omission is mirrored in current theoretical accounts that have struggled to accommodate the paradox that is older adults actively shaping their working lives in retirement. Platts will make both theoretical and empirical contributions by studying older people’s working lives in the contrasting contexts of the United States, Sweden, and Türkiye.

Platts is a scholar of aging and the life course. She is employed as researcher at the Department of Psychology at Stockholm University and is a docent in public health sciences. Her research draws on analyses of panel and interview data to develop innovative understandings of older people’s working lives. Platts holds degrees from Imperial College London (PhD), Sciences Po Paris (MA), and the University of Oxford (BA). She is the Riksbanken Jubileumsfond-CASBS Fellow for 2025-26.