The panel Ageing on the Move: Welfare Access, Rights, and Inequalities in Later Life, to be held during the IMISCOE 2027 Annual Conference (in Brussels and online), is now accepting contributions! Read more details about this panel linked to SC Families, Welfare, Care and the Life Course below:
Panel Abstract
How is access to welfare, care, and social security in later life reconfigured when lives unfold across more than one country? A growing number of older adults have built their lives across multiple national systems of pensions, healthcare, and family support, for reasons ranging from employment and family circumstances to financial considerations, citizenship, environmental change, lifestyle and conflict-driven displacement. Yet migration research remains largely focused on younger cohorts and single-country contexts, leaving a more limited understanding of how access to rights and welfare is negotiated across borders and where gaps and frictions emerge.
This panel pays particular attention to societies across the world where population ageing coincides with welfare-state retrenchment, increasingly restrictive border regimes, selective mobility policies, and widening rural-urban and socioeconomic inequalities. These shifts are reconfiguring what retirement security means while also reshaping global geographies of ageing, privilege and precarity. By centring the lived and transnational realities of migrants who are retired or approaching retirement, it asks how welfare institutions, family networks, and private actors interact across borders, and how these interactions shape who can claim protection and access support infrastructures in later life, who is excluded, and who must develop informal or alternative arrangements. Addressing these questions is essential to understanding how those on the move imagine and plan for their futures in later life in increasingly uneven and uncertain contexts. panel welcomes qualitative, ethnographic, visual, and interdisciplinary approaches. We particularly encourage contributions that reflect on the methodological challenges and innovations of researching ageing across borders, including multi-sited or transnational fieldwork, longitudinal approaches to mobile populations, and strategies for comparing or connecting fragmented welfare and care systems, as well as critical contributions that aim to challenge taken-for-granted concepts applied to ageing migrant populations.
Please submit 250-word paper abstracts, together with the author(s)’ names, affiliations, and contact details, by September 20, 2026, to:
Dora Sampaio