two - Population ageing and international migration

Summary

This chapter aims to introduce ethnicity scholars to the societal challenge that is population ageing, and social gerontologists to the challenges that are posed by the globalisation of international migration and by transnationalism. The idea is that both fields of scholarship will gain insight into what has been written in each field about the challenge that lies closest to their expertise and what makes the intersection of ethnicity and old age an interesting angle of investigation for their fields of interest. This insight will hopefully give the audiences that this book addresses a common ground from which their dialogue can begin. It is, after all, these societal challenges that are at the core of the growing interest in the intersection of ethnicity and old age. More importantly, if we use Swedberg's (2012a) work (as mentioned in the previous chapter) to set this chapter in motion, we could say that the societal trends that this chapter discusses (population ageing, globalisation, international migration and transnationalism) are trends that make the theorising exercise in the second part of this book a timely one. My argument in this chapter is thus that one of the reasons why we should engage in the imaginative phase of discovery that Swedberg calls theorising is that the time is right because the premises on which our understandings of ethnicity and old age have been built have become obsolete due to the societal trends mentioned here.

The chapter begins with population ageing, which is the societal challenge that both audiences for this book have in common and then moves on to discuss globalisation, transnationalism and international migration in general terms (with specific attention paid to the implications of these trends for the study of culture, ‘periphery’ and inequality). These are the societal trends that ethnicity scholars would most likely know more about, and which gerontologists interested in ethnicity need to become more conversant about. The chapter includes a section that explicitly addresses why the challenges in focus here need to be taken into account when thinking of research, policy and practice at the intersection between ethnicity and old age.