Anthropology & Aging

Rethinking Intergenerational Living as the Ideal Form of Senior Care: Life Course Research with Immigrant Families in Toronto

2024-06-26T19:08:49-04:00

Canada’s care systems are ill-equipped to support its aging population, and this crisis intertwines with an acute shortage of affordable housing. Immigrants to Canada have a higher propensity to cohabitate multi-generationally, an arrangement that is sometimes romanticized as an ideal form of senior care. This article contributes to scholarship exploring intergenerational cohabitation as a practice of care, using life course research to consider how class and migration timing shape experiences of intergenerational living and senior care. Based on 19 in-depth interviews with immigrant seniors from Latin America and the Caribbean (n=10) and family caregivers (n=9) living in the Greater Toronto Area, this study uncovers two central findings. First, intergenerational living should not be viewed as an ideal form of senior care since (1a) some seniors resist intergenerational living, preferring independence and downtown residence nearer to culturally relevant communities and (1b) cohabitation does not always provide sufficient or better care. Second, access to smooth multigenerational cohabitation is inequitable, as housing arrangements are structured by class and migration timing, with middle-class families who have been in Canada longer facing fewer barriers to positive experiences of intergenerational living, compared to more recent migrants with lower incomes. This article challenges culturally essentializing assumptions about immigrant intergenerational cohabitation and argues that access to affordable housing is a senior care issue.

Narratives of Personhood and Caregiving in Ontario Long-Term Care Homes During COVID-19

2023-10-05T15:03:19-04:00

Drawing on narratives recorded from family members of residents in long-term care homes in Ontario, Canada, during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, in this paper, I present a two-pronged argument. First, following Taylor (2008) and Seaman (2018, 2020) I suggest that family caregiving for residents of long-term care homes helps to sustain residents’ personhood: the recognition of their identity as an ongoing participant in their social universe. The second part of my argument is that caregiving is a multifaceted and paradoxical endeavour. While caregiving can be a transformative and reciprocal practice of self-actualization (cf. Kleinman 2012; Kleinman and van der Geest 2009), at times it can also be troubled, ambivalent, and stressful (Cook and Trumble 2020). At its best, caregiving is a two-way street, enabling the maintenance of personhood for the care recipient, and validating the caregiver’s sense of ‘moral agency,’ or what medical anthropologist Neely Myers (2015, 13) defines as the capacity to be recognized in one’s local sphere as a good person who can make intimate connections to others. When caregiving goes awry, however, it leads to frustration, despair, and a sense of moral failure for the caregiver. For the care recipient, non-recognition and the loss of personhood can lead to social death and may also hasten physical decline. I conclude that for both professional and family caregivers of long-term care residents, systemic improvement of social and material support is needed to mitigate the challenges inherent in the recognition of personhood in caregiving relationships.

Growing Old in the City: Challenges of Access to and Control of Urban Houses among Older Women in Low-income Suburbs of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

2024-04-16T13:46:50-04:00

This study addresses the struggles for housing among older women, including the meaning attached to ownership and control of urban houses among low-income households. It analyses the extent to which older women in low-income suburbs of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, can age-in-place. I explain how the ideal of ageing in place for the nineteen women in this research (ages 60 – 90) is dependent on factors such as access to and control of one’s housing situation, which are impacted by whether or not they have good sibling and intergenerational family relationships. Family conflicts and unpleasant interactions with siblings, adult children, nephews, nieces, and grandchildren affect their chances of ageing well in their place of choice forcing some of them to begrudgingly retrace their steps back to the rural areas. These older women are poor and do not have reliable sources of income to look after themselves and the children under their care.

The Collateral Damage of Policy Reform: Low-Income Women Retirees, State Feminism, and the Pension System in Sweden

2024-04-24T07:03:14-04:00

In 2014, the Swedish government declared itself the first feminist government in the world. Indeed, the country has been successful in promoting gender equality, yet many retired women, particularly in rural areas, live on an income below the EU poverty line. Based on analysis of Sweden’s pension system, the country’s commitment to gender equality, and interviews with low-income women pensioners in rural Sweden, this article explores why some women end up living in poverty in later life. The article demonstrates how the Swedish pension reform of the 1990s has generated a structural lag; today’s older women have lived during times that were radically different from the world nowadays, yet their pensions are based on forward-looking ideals. Consequently, today’s older women have become “collateral damage” (Bauman 2011) of securing a new form of pension system, and seemingly also neglected in the state’s promise of ensuring gender equality.

From the Editor-in-Chief

2024-08-06T18:55:35-04:00

Book Review: Calling Family: Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives

2024-05-09T17:16:00-04:00

Film Review: Half Elf

2024-05-09T17:11:01-04:00

Book Review: Gender and Age/Aging in Popular Culture: Representations in Film, Music, Literature, and Social Media

2024-05-09T16:55:31-04:00

Book Review: Collaborative Happiness: Building the Good Life in Urban Cohousing Communities

2024-05-09T17:21:29-04:00

Film Review: Death of the One Who Knows

2024-05-09T17:27:18-04:00

Book Review: Ageing with Smartphones in Uganda Togetherness in The Dotcom Age

2024-05-30T17:21:04-04:00

Book Review: Late-Life Homelessness: Experiences of Disadvantage and Unequal Aging

2024-01-23T07:20:32-05:00

Book Review: Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care

2024-06-21T08:53:57-04:00

Book Review: Troubling Inheritances: Memory, Music and Aging

2024-06-21T08:43:30-04:00

Book Review: Migration, Diversity and Inequality in Later Life: Ageing at a Crossroad

2024-06-21T07:08:07-04:00

Introduction: Debating Desirable Aging Futures through Technology

2024-10-09T06:42:40-04:00

Technology a Co-Actor in Kinning and ‘Desirable’ Aging?

2024-09-11T11:15:04-04:00

Digital Kinship: The Future Calling

2024-09-10T15:32:47-04:00

Technologized Intimacies and Posthuman Kinship Across the Life Course

2024-09-11T11:21:59-04:00

Doing Futures-Anthropology Research in Visions of Aging Technology

2024-09-11T11:25:20-04:00

Navigating Mediated Kinship and Care in Our Aging Futures

2024-09-10T15:28:28-04:00