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Ageing Migrants’ Sense of Home
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07 September 2026

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.
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration & Immigration, Health, illness or addiction: social aspects, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gerontology, FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Life Stages / Later Years, Age groups: the elderly / old age, Care of the elderly
This book offers an insightful examination of ageing, belonging, and migration. By ethnographically considering the specific case of older Italian migrants in the North East of England, Simona Palladino explores bigger issues of how transnational ageing complicates easy assumptions around ‘home’, ‘place attachment’, and ‘identity’ in later life.
— Professor Cathrine Degnen, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University
Simona Palladino is a Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences at Liverpool Hope University, UK; Fellow of Higher Education and a member of the British Society of Gerontology.
Chapter 1. Introducing a ‘Sense of Home’ amongst Ageing Migrants
Chapter 2. How did We Get There: Historical Perspective on Italians in England
Chapter 3. Looking for a Place to Belong to
Chapter 4. Issues in Later Life
Chapter 5. Imagined Communities of Belonging
Chapter 6. Contributions to Research and Policy on Ageing