"Migration, Ageing and Translocal Social Protection"

Events 2024

Start: Apr 24, 2024 02:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
End: Apr 25, 2024 07:00 PM
Location: MPI-MMG, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, Göttingen
Room: Library Hall
Host: Max Planck Research Group "Ageing in a Time of Mobility"

"Migration, Ageing and Translocal Social Protection"

In a global context of population ageing, migration and forced displacement, questions of transnational and translocal social protection remain paramount. Migrants and refugees at different stages of the life course seek social protection through a variety of channels: from formal state-based pension and social security schemes; cash transfers and humanitarian initiatives; to informal forms of social protection through kinship, religious networks, neighbourhood support groups, co-operatives and civil society organizations. Cutting across these different spaces are financial institutions and markets in promoting ideas and products around individualized future security. Piecing together these different forms of social protection is far from seamless and there are numerous inequalities that migrants and refugees confront in securing social protection and wellbeing, where some are eligible for formal support and others are excluded.

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For more details please contact zhang@mmg.mpg.de.

In this workshop, we take as a critical starting point the idea that the category of social protection is not fixed but defined and experienced differently by multiple actors. We consider how ideas about social protection are shaped by shifting global and local policies, entitlements and infrastructures, alongside an in-depth consideration of how migrant and refugee populations themselves imagine, creatively arrange and claim social protection ‘from below’.

Some of the broader questions this workshop will address include: what constitutes the ‘social’ in social protection? How is social protection imagined transnationally or translocally? Who offers ‘protection’ to migrants and refugees and what moral dimensions around ‘deservingness’ come into play? How does old-age factor into the development of social protection? How do social protection schemes promote or restrict the mobility of older populations?

In addressing the questions above, we will grant particular attention to the intersections of migration, ageing and social protection – including the experiences of older migrants and refugees, those who care for older adults, and older adults with migrant family members. Moving beyond a binary framework contrasting European state-based ‘welfare’ regimes with informal social support in other contexts, we aim to investigate how ideas about social protection travel to produce ‘hybrid’ formations (Levitt et al. 2023) and entanglements over time in contexts around the world. We will consider how ideas, norms and practices of social protection unfold not only on the global, transnational scale but also translocally in contexts of cross-border and internal migration and displacement.