1st Edition

Retirement Migration Paradoxes of Ageing

By Caroline Oliver Copyright 2008
    208 Pages
    by Routledge

    208 Pages
    by Routledge

    The book is the first ethnographic study of international retirement migration and offers a sometimes surprising picture of the potentials, seductions and limitations of the lifestyles. People envision retirement as freedom from responsibilities through shedding the restrictive shackles of their former selves in a time of life dedicated to fun, friendship, healthy activity and individual fulfillment. However, as Oliver documents, a number of contradictions underpin the pursuits of such a lifestyle. She shows how retirees must balance time-use to achieve both freedoms and busy social schedules -- their activities, their relationships, and their cultural identities – to balance both the security of nationality with the discovery of the new. Retirement Migration gives a critical insight into the new ways aging identities are experienced by a growing number of older people in Western societies today.

    1. Introduction: Flirting with Freedom  2. Cultural Contexts: Positive Ageing, Migration and Place  3. Location, Location, Location: Retiring in Spain  4. The Time of our Lives: Temporality and the Life Course  5. Does Age Matter?: Positive Ageing and Place  6. Community and the Individual in Migrants’ Spain  7. Cultural Identities, Ageing and Death  8. Conclusion: Paradoxes of Ageing in Retirement Migration

    Biography

    Caroline Oliver is a Senior Researcher at the Centre of Migration, Policy and Society at the University of Oxford. She has worked previously at the University of Cambridge and the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and completed her PhD at the University of Hull, UK.

    "This book is a welcome addition to the few book-length ethnographies and community studies of retired migrant lifestyles."

    -Tony Warnes, University of Sheffield, Ageing & Society