Ageing As a Migrant “In Place”: Relational Perspectives on Belonging, Agency and Later Life

This session invites contributions that examine the experience of growing older as a long-settled migrant in the destination country. Research on migration and ageing has tended to privilege two analytical entry points, care and vulnerability, often leaving agency, belonging and wider relational worlds in the background (King et al., 2017). Drawing on relational sociology (Emirbayer, 1997), this session proposes an approach that shifts the question from "how do older migrants live?" towards "how are their experiences configured through relations, trajectories, and inhabited places?"

The session responds to the Congress's call for a global sociology that moves beyond reductionist narratives of crisis, attending instead to relationality, creativity and agency in migrant lives. Older migrants are thus constituted as subjects connected to a complex socio-spatial environment, whose subjective states, everyday practices and attachments to place reveal agency through that connectedness. Categories such as "migrant" or "older adult" are then understood not as fixed attributes but as relational positionings produced historically and varying with trajectory, context and relationship.

We welcome papers addressing:

• Life trajectories and the agency deployed against structural constraints
• Social connections sustained translocally, and their role for migrants growing older
• Senses of belonging and home as produced, contested and transformed over time
• Orientations towards the future, including aspirations and legacy in later life.

Contributions engaging with South-South and South-North migration contexts are equally welcome.

The session aims to foster dialogue across regional literatures and advance a relational research agenda attentive to the spatial, temporal and social complexity of migrant ageing.