Ageing Migrants’ Sense of Home: Experiences of Older Italians in the UK

Given the increasing number of international older migrants in Europe and the UK, Ageing Migrants’ Sense of Home addresses a critical gap in understanding the conditions that facilitate or impede positive ageing in the context of migration, enhancing scholarly knowledge on how processes of identification and sense of belonging to places are experienced by people ageing away from their home countries. Grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork with a community of older Italians in Northeast England, Palladino explores experiences of ageing across borders, feelings of embeddedness in local communities, negotiation of belonging and perceived vulnerability. Highlighting how participants experience private and public spaces, their transnational lifestyles, and relationships with objects of affection, memory, and identity, chapters underscore the importance of affective bonds with places. Place attachment and identity impact health and well-being in later life, and insights into older migrants' subjectivities and life stories stress the social aspects of the environment and the importance of having places to call 'home' in the context of migration. Drawing critical attention to the diversity of ageing experiences among older migrants and the need for research, practice and policy to respond to their needs both locally and internationally, this is a significant resource for researchers in social sciences, social gerontology, and human geography.