The Life Course in a Migrating World: Hybrid Scripts of Ageing and Imaginaries of Care

As part of his research activities at the Department of Anthropology and Center for Healthy Ageing, former Associate Professor Bjarke Oxlund, has recently published a prolegomenon to future work in the joint fields of ageing and migration, titled 'The Life Course in a Migrating World: Hybrid Scripts of Ageing and Imaginaries of Care.'

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. The 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.

Bjarke Oxlund, The Life Course in a Migrating World: Hybrid Scripts of Ageing and Imaginaries of Care, Advances in Life Course Research, September 2018.