Transnational Filial Care in the Context of Migration and Ageing Description

Description

This PhD dissertation project examines the complexities of transnational filial care within the context of migration. As such, this project’s starting point is the demographic trends that have led to a steady expansion of the population aged 75 and above, coupled with a contraction of working-age cohorts in some parts of the world. These trends render the study of care for older people to be an increasingly important angle of investigation for social scientists (as well as policy makers). Because these trends will affect low- and middle-income countries more heavily, where rapid population ageing unfolds in the absence of robust welfare systems, this dissertation will focus on such countries.

Worth mentioning is also that sustained out-migration has compelled a reconfiguration of both cultural expectations and practical arrangements of care within transnational families, particularly in societies simultaneously experiencing high youth emigration and demographic ageing. Thus, since the preferred care mode when caring for older people is often grounded in different epistemologies across societies, this dissertation examines how normative expectations, legal frameworks, and caregiving practices transcend national boundaries and are reconfigured through the migration experiences of adult children who have left their ageing parents behind in their countries of birth. The dissertation aims to study how migrants and their ageing parents negotiate care, despite temporal and spatial separations. To this end, the project employs a mixed-methods design, integrating qualitative interviews with administrative data, to investigate the dynamics of intergenerational care across borders.

Supervisors: Prof. Sandra Torres & Dr. Roujman Shahbazian (both at the Department of Sociology, Uppsala University)