Retirement Migration Paradoxes of Ageing [Paperback]

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 Migrationgives 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

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

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.