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Ageing, Gender, and Migration: Theorising Entwined Becomings

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Ageing, Gender, and Labour Migration

Part of the book series: Mobility & Politics ((MPP))

Abstract

The key conceptual approach is to see ageing, gender, and migration together as entwined becomings. Whilst migration is relatively straightforward—movement across an international border for a certain threshold of time—ageing and gender are social and cultural constructions; they are relational and situational. Gender is now largely mainstreamed into migration research; ageing much less so. In this study of Latvian women, ageing connects theoretically to life course and family studies, social network theory, and segmented labour market analysis. Ageing women find low-wage work in agricultural labour, the hotel and catering sector, and domestic cleaning. A well-being approach is very useful to grasp the multi-dimensionally changing lives of older migrant women.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    If there was any expectation that the ‘opening’ of Eastern Europe would produce older-age migration flows, it was more in the context of second-home purchase and retirement migration, especially to the sunnier, warmer, more scenically attractive and ‘cheaper’ of the accession countries, like Bulgaria, Slovenia, and latterly Croatia.

  2. 2.

    See the classic papers by Sjaastad (1962), Lee (1966) and Borjas (1989); or for more recent overviews, useful summaries in the standard migration textbooks such as Boyle et al. (1998: 59–67) or Samers (2010: 54–62).

  3. 3.

    For a good example of research on the gendered and racialised patterns of employment of migrants in the secondary economy of a major city, see the comprehensive study on London by Wills et al. (2010).

  4. 4.

    There is also an argument for nominating Latvia, the other Baltic states, and some other East European countries as semi-periphery (Nölke and Vliegenthart 2009; Santana and Boschi 2012). Following Wallerstein’s (2004) systems theory, semi-periphery is an in-between category, blending some characteristics of both core and periphery, intermediate economically and geographically. During the 1970s, Seers (1979: 17) classified Finland and Italy as semi-peripheral. As for the Baltic and other Central and Eastern EU countries currently, Nölke and Vliegenthart (2009: 670) classify them as ‘dependent market economies’ integrated within the EU but with limited ability to set their own macroeconomic policies, due partly to the limited scale of their internal markets.

  5. 5.

    For pioneering statements on time-geography, see Hägerstrand (1976, 1985), whose terminology of migration- and mobility-related life paths, projects, and constraints we will follow here. In contradistinction to Hägerstrand’s continuous life paths snaking through time-space, Hörschelmann (2011) introduced into life-course studies the important perspective of rupture and discontinuity, again very relevant to how our Latvian research participants’ lives and migration paths develop.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

    Aija Lulle & Russell King

  2. Department of Social Science, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland

    Aija Lulle

  3. Centre for Diaspora and Migration Research, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia

    Aija Lulle

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  1. Aija Lulle
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  2. Russell King
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Lulle, A., King, R. (2016). Ageing, Gender, and Migration: Theorising Entwined Becomings. In: Ageing, Gender, and Labour Migration. Mobility & Politics. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55615-8_2

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