seven - A new agenda: where we are at and need to head for

Summary

Ending a book is always one of the exciting parts of writing one. It is in the concluding chapter that one wraps things up and argues, in a nutshell, for what the book has offered to the scholarships to which it aims to contribute. A book's conclusion should therefore spell out what one ought to have learned while reading it. Referring back to this book's Introduction therefore seems like a good way to start. After all, we need to recap what it is this book intended to do if we are to summarise what it claims to have accomplished. Thus, it seems necessary to restate that I started by stating that this book aimed to expand the imagination of scholars working on the intersection of ethnicity and old age, and show where the potential for growth lies as far as our scholarly understanding of what it is that ethnicity and race mean for the study of ageing and old age.

The reason why I began this journey is that I had noted that the ways in which social gerontologists made sense of ethnicity and race did not chime with the advancements that have been made in scholarship that focuses on these identification grounds over the past few decades. I suspected that this was bound to have consequences for ‘the imagination’ of scholarship on the intersection of ethnicity and old age. Back then, I didn't quite know exactly what the state of this scholarship was like, but since I am a sociologist whose critical gerontology research uses ethnicity scholarship to expand the gerontological imagination, I felt I could make an educated guess. Thus, in the introduction to this book I proposed that social gerontologists (myself included, of course) were at a crossroads since, as a whole, our scholarship needed to rethink how it made sense of ethnicity and race. I argued also that this very fact - together with the fact that ethnicity scholars (and especially those working on migration) had just recently discovered old age and ageing as angles of investigation for their inquiries - meant that the time was right to embark on a theorising exercise so that we could take stock of what we knew and needed to find out as far as understandings of ethnicity were concerned in relation to scholarship that focuses on the intersection of ethnicity and old age.