CALL FOR PAPERS – Workshop on ‘Ageing Migrants’
IMISCOE Annual Conference “Crisis and Migration – Perceptions, Challenges and Consequences”, Malmö, Sweden, 26-27 August 2013
Session 3
GENERATION ‘ZERO’: MOBILE GRAND-PARENTS AND INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSNATIONAL SOLIDARITIES
Organized by: Dr. Mihaela Nedelcu, Associate Professor, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland
When looking at migration and ageing processes, migration scholars are usually interested in understanding what specific needs ageing migrants have and how receiving societies deal with them, at the crossroad of public care institutions and informal family networks. However, there is a particular category of ageing population that becomes increasingly mobile, mostly after retirement, although it remains quasi-invisible in international migration studies: the migrants’ parents. These ageing, retired, persons are usually considered as passive, non-migrant receivers of care within various transnational families arrangements. Moreover, the generation question in migration studies usually arises for the migrants’ descent; thus one speaks about first, second, even third generations of migrants. What happens nevertheless with the migrants’ parents? Could one speak about a ‘zero’ generation in migration?
Recent evidence shows that complex transnational family solidarities engage migrants’ parents within a large range of transnational dynamics, especially since affordable long-distance travel and new communication technologies enable novel forms of ‘being together’ transnationally. Regular transnational back-and-forth mobilities are part and parcel of the functioning of transnational care chains and intergenerational exchanges in which this population is actively involved. Migrants’ parents often become increasingly mobile after retirement; they relocate temporarily or permanently as a result of the migration of their children and grandchildren. On the one hand, grandparenting is an active dimension of their migration; on the other hand, their geographical mobility results from their own needs for proximate emotional and physical care.
This session invites papers based on empirical work from various disciplines that raise
methodological and theoretical discussions and address the following questions:
- How are migrants’ parents involved (locally or transnationally) in circulation of care and what roles are ageing parents playing in transnational family dynamics?
- How are these roles transformed by ICT-mediated practices and new co-presence regimes?
- What forms do intergenerational solidarities take in migration contexts and how is grandparenting expressed over borders?
- Which are the factors that influence parents’ mobility (age, language skills, health condition, travel and communication capacity, family reunification policy, …)?
- How do host-state migration policies and welfare regimes deal with specific ‘Generation zero’ issues?
To submit a paper for this session, please send a Word document with the paper title and an abstract of no more than 500 words, together with your name and institutional affiliation, to Mihaela Nedelcu at [log in to unmask] no later than 31st May 2013.
Accepted participants will be notified by June 15, 2013. They are required to send full-length papers (no more than 60’000 characters) by 10 August 2013. To facilitate discussion and exchanges, these papers will be circulated in advance to workshop participants. Time for presentation will be 20 minutes. It is expected that a selection of papers will be published as an edited volume or a special issue.
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