Lecture | Online webinar
Book talk 'Aspiring in Later Life: Movements across Time, Space, and Generations'
- Date
- Thursday 1 February 2024
- Time
- Explanation
- Central European Time
- Location
- Online
Participation is free and open for all. Please register via the button below. The meeting link will be sent to registered participants one week before the event.
Register for Aspiring in Later LifeDuring the talk, the book will be introduced by the editors, Dr. Megha Amrith, Dr. Victoria K. Sakti and Dr. Dora Sampaio, and two of the volume’s contributing authors, Dr. Alfonso Otaegui and Dr. Harmandeep Gill.
About the book
In our highly interconnected and globalized world, people often pursue their aspirations in multiple places. Yet in public and scholarly debates, aspirations are often seen as the realm of younger, mobile generations, since they are assumed to hold the greatest potential for shaping the future. This volume flips this perspective on its head by exploring how aspirations are constructed from the vantage point of later life, and shows how they are pursued across time, space, and generations. The aspirations of older people are diverse, and relate not only to aging itself but also to planning the next generation’s future, preparing an "ideal" retirement, searching for intimacy and self-realization, and confronting death and afterlives. Aspiring in Later Life brings together rich ethnographic cases from different regions of the world, offering original insights into how aspirations shift over the course of life and how they are pursued in contexts of translocal mobility.
This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.
About the authors
Dr. Megha Amrith leads the “Ageing in a Time of Mobility” Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. Her research interests are on migrant labor, care, aging, inequalities, and belonging, with a current focus on aging migrant domestic workers in Asia. She is the author of Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia and co-editor of the volume Gender, Work and Migration.
Dr. Victoria K. Sakti is a postdoctoral research fellow of the Max Planck Research Group “Ageing in a Time of Mobility” in Göttingen, Germany. She has conducted long-term research in Indonesia and Timor-Leste on aging, forced displacement, (im)mobilities, violence, memory, and social repair. Her publications deal with older refugee experiences, care practices within and across borders, aspirations related to a good life and death, local idioms of distress, and the temporal dimensions of displacement.
Dr. Dora Sampaio is assistant professor in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Utrecht University. She is also a research associate with the Max Planck Research Group “Ageing in a Time of Mobility.” Her research interests are on aging, migration, transnational families, care, and the life course. She co-edited a special issue of the journal Area on aging and migration. She is the author of Migration, Diversity and Inequality in Later Life: Ageing at a Crossroads, an ethnography of migrants aging in the Portuguese islands of the Azores.
Dr. Harmandeep Kaur Gill is a Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College and an Associate Member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. Gill has worked with Tibetans in exile for over a decade, focusing on the lives of marginalized people. Her book manuscript "Waiting at a Mountain Pass: Coming to Terms with Solitude, Decline, and Death in Tibetan Exile" is currently under production with University of Pennsylvania Press and will be published later this year.
Dr. Alfonso Otaegui obtained his PhD in social anthropology at the EHESS (France). He did research among Peruvian migrants working in Santiago, Chile, focusing on communicative practices related to aging and health care in new digital environments. He also carried out fieldwork among older adults adopting new technologies and participated in the development digital literacy initiatives and further applied anthropology projects. He is currently a UX Researcher in Germany working in usability engineering for medical devices.
