Writing a book is not an easy task. When the book one is working on is a scholarly contribution, as this one is, it is not uncommon to think about this momentous task in terms of what one wants to contribute to the scholarly debates that one has been following for years, which have ignited the commitment needed to embark on a book project. Spelling out what I personally wanted to accomplish with this book seemed like an appropriate way to start when I first thought about what this preface would be about. But the more I pondered on what to write, the more I realised that I wanted to do justice to the journey that has led me here. Because book projects are quite often journeys. As such, they take us from one destination to another along whirlwind roads often taken while gaining clarity regarding where you are heading and why. It is because of this that I decided to use this preface to tell the story of why I decided to write a book about ethnicity and old age in order to expand my own, as well as my peers’, imagination.

Telling this story requires that I start from the very beginning, since I need to do justice to how this journey started and what it has meant to my scholarly self. When I first enrolled in the doctoral programme in sociology back in the mid-1990s here in Sweden, there was no one else who shared my research interests. Back then, I was conducting what people back home (and now I mean the US) often refer to as ethno- or anthropo-gerontology research and nobody in my department other than my supervisor thought I was on to something. Few sociologists in Sweden were interested in old age back then. Ethnicity and migration scholars in this country had yet to consider that old age was a part of the life course that deserved their attention. Consequently, finding a scholarly community that I could call my own was not easy when I first started out in academia. I remember how lonely I felt while attending international sociology of ageing conferences in the beginning, since nobody was working on issues related to culture and migration.