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Given the increasing number of international older migrants in Europe and the UK, Ageing Migrants’ Sense of Home addresses a critical gap in understanding the conditions that facilitate or impede positive ageing in the context of migration, enhancing scholarly knowledge on how processes of identification and sense of belonging to places are experienced by people ageing away from their home countries.
Grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork with a community of older Italians in Northeast England, Palladino explores experiences of ageing across borders, feelings of embeddedness in local communities, negotiation of belonging and perceived vulnerability. Highlighting how participants experience private and public spaces, their transnational lifestyles, and relationships with objects of affection, memory, and identity, chapters underscore the importance of affective bonds with places. Place attachment and identity impact health and well-being in later life, and insights into older migrants' subjectivities and life stories stress the social aspects of the environment and the importance of having places to call 'home' in the context of migration.
Drawing critical attention to the diversity of ageing experiences among older migrants and the need for research, practice and policy to respond to their needs both locally and internationally, this is a significant resource for researchers in social sciences, social gerontology, and human geography.
This book offers an insightful examination of ageing, belonging, and migration. By ethnographically considering the specific case of older Italian migrants in the North East of England, Simona Palladino explores bigger issues of how transnational ageing complicates easy assumptions around ‘home’, ‘place attachment’, and ‘identity’ in later life.
— Professor Cathrine Degnen, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University
One of the most salient debates in the UK at present is around immigration. How do we balance economic necessity and humanitarian obligations while being cognizant of widespread public concern move for control and capacity and, for some, national identity. As a welcome respite from this toxic rhetoric, it is a joy to welcome this book by Simona Palladino that makes an excellent contribution to social gerontology and migration studies. In her work with older Italians who left their homes for the UK and the promise of work and peace after the Second World War she fuses ethnographic depth with critical scholarly attention to identity and place attachment.
— Professor Rose Gilroy, Professor of Ageing, Planning and Policy, Chair of Newcastle Age Friendly City, School of Architecture Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University
Dr. Palladino’s book makes a major and critical contribution to our understanding of older migrants in particular and older adults in general. The experience of migrants as they age is often studied from interactions with persons outside their communities, such as health professionals. Dr. Palladino digs deep into the inner lives of those migrants to help us see the world as they see it. Further, while there is research on the impact of programs, such as senior centers on the lives of older persons, her research shows how older migrants can demonstrate agency – the ability to transform some services to meet their special needs. While other studies have examined the lives of aging migrants in their individual contexts, Dr. Palladino places them in the contexts of being in diaspora and at home -especially with children born in their new lands-. It is in her ability to give voice to these migrants, to understand both the contexts that shape their lives and the ways in which they are not just passive actors, but actively respond to those contexts, that we are indebted to her not only for a better understanding of older migrants, but the experience of all persons who are growing older.
— Dr. Allen Glicksman, Director of Research, Eastern Pennsylvania Geriatrics Society
Simona Palladino is a Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences at Liverpool Hope University, UK; Fellow of Higher Education and a member of the British Society of Gerontology.
Chapter 1. Introducing a ‘Sense of Home’ amongst Ageing Migrants
Chapter 2. How did We Get There: Historical Perspective on Italians in England
Chapter 3. Looking for a Place to Belong to
Chapter 4. Issues in Later Life
Chapter 5. Imagined Communities of Belonging
Chapter 6. Contributions to Research and Policy on Ageing