The life course in a migrating world: Hybrid scripts of ageing and imaginaries of care

Abstract

Abstract More and more people across the globe are ageing in countries and regions other than the one they were born in. The increased level of transnational migration has become a social fact that challenges scholars to go beyond models that understand ageing and the life course from a national or a mono-cultural perspective. One of the main themes or challenges that have come to the fore at the policy level is that of care. This is often embedded in a global “ageist discourse,” whereby the concerns about care services needed for ageing migrants add to the already negative understandings of an elder burden brought about by the longevity of the baby boom generation. At the same time, questions of care often become a critical site for the concrete negotiation of what it means to age well according the wide range of social norms and values represented in diverse migrant populations or so-called host societies. This underscores the need for the cross-fertilization of the conceptual frameworks of social science studies of ageing and migration with a view to care, since the combined explanatory power of life course studies and migration studies make it possible to grasp the multiplicity of experiences concerning ageing and the life course in the context of specific power relations and legal frameworks. This theoretical article argues that in a globalizing world, culturally informed scripts of ageing are taking on more and more hybrid forms, while imaginaries of care are rapidly changing as a consequence of this hybridity. In order to make sense of the nexus of ageing, migration and care these developments must be addressed in a theoretically informed vocabulary that pays due attention to the intermediary processes related to how intimate ageing lives are intertwined with globalization in an age of migration.