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technical paper
Aging in Contexts of Im/Mobility Regimes
keywords:
immigration/migration
aging and life course
mobility
Im/mobility regimes refer to the political-economic processes by which people are bounded, emplaced, forced or permitted to move and to migrate (Brandhorst, Baldassar, and Wilding 2020; Glick-Schiller and Salazar 2013). This panel examines how im/mobility regimes relate to lived experiences of aging around the world. Additionally, this panel grapples with how a focus on age and aging may enhance understanding of im/mobilities. Investigating im/mobility regimes destabilizes assumptions about mobility in old age. While old age is often associated with stasis and decline, the world’s population is increasingly growing up and growing older in contexts of migration. Older adults engage in return and retirement migration; they are refugees, displaced by violence and environmental change; and they actively participate in transnational families, even when they do not migrate themselves. Yet, it would be equally problematic to associate mobility in old age with freedom (Salazar and Smart 2011). Anthropological research suggests that migration often reproduces the social, political, and economic inequalities that shape differential aging experiences and undergird the need to migrate (Coe 2017; Yarris 2014), even as older adults and their families creatively adapt to migratory contexts (Ahlin 2018; Lamb 2009). How do we reconcile this tension between creative agency and inequality in aging, as foregrounded by im/mobility regimes? This panel brings together research on aging and migration in diverse contexts, including eldercare in transnational families, international retirement migration, repeated migration throughout the life course, and migrations to elderhood. Together, the papers in this panel theorize relationships among mobilities, immobilities, and aging.