Making sense of the construct of successful ageing: the migrant experience

Abstract

This chapter addresses the state of theoretical affairs of research concerned with one of gerontology's most debated constructs; that is, successful ageing. Hereby, it is argued that much could be learned if we were to treat international migrants as sources of theoretically fruitful information about the way in which understandings of successful ageing are shaped and reformulated through the lifecourse. This argument, however, is not a new one since I have been trying to raise social gerontology's awareness of the unexplored potential embedded in studying international migrant populations ever since it dawned to me that theory development in social gerontology was often a native (not to mention western-only) endeavour. The sections that follow will be, to a certain extent, a reiteration of what has been briefly argued elsewhere (Torres, 1998, 2001a, 2003c), namely that the migrant experience and the destabilisation of lifecourse continuity inherent to it offer interesting angles for theory building in social gerontology. The argument that will be put forth is not exclusively theoretical, however. Empirical illustrations on the challenges that the process of migration poses to the way in which understandings of successful ageing are shaped will be used to show that the international migrant experience offers a relatively unexplored yet fruitful point of departure for social gerontological research. However, before these areas can be explored it seems necessary to highlight what makes the migrant experience unique and how I came to regard elders with such backgrounds as potential sources of information about how notions of successful ageing are constructed through the lifecourse.