About
‘Ageing in a Time of Mobility’ is a global and interdisciplinary project that investigates the interconnections between two key phenomena in the twenty-first century: ageing populations and global migration. These phenomena are often spoken about in parallel, where ageing populations are understood as being in situ, embodying stillness and stasis, rather than mobility. Yet in many ways, ageing and migration are highly interconnected, jointly bringing about new social, cultural and political-economic transformations in many regions across the world. Older groups of people are among refugee populations displaced by conflict and environmental change; they migrate across borders to build new lives in retirement communities; and even when they do not physically move, their lives may be profoundly transformed by the translocal mobilities of their family members. In many cases, they are not merely passive presences ‘left behind’, but agents of such transformations themselves.
Team
Dr. Megha Amrith (Research Group Leader)
(PhD Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge) leads the Max Planck Research Group “Ageing in a Time of Mobility”. Her research focuses on migrant labour, care, ageing, inequalities, belonging, and temporality, primarily in Southeast Asia, but also drawing upon comparative ethnographic perspectives. Within the group, she is researching the experiences of ageing migrant domestic workers in Singapore. She is author of the monograph “Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia” (NIAS Press, 2017) and co-editor (with Nina Sahraoui) of the volume “Gender, Work and Migration” (Routledge, 2018).
Dr. Victoria Kumala Sakti
(PhD Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) is a social and cultural anthropologist and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Research Group, ‘Ageing in a Time of Mobility’, Germany. She has conducted long-term research in Indonesia and Timor-Leste on ageing, forced displacement, (im)mobilities, violence, memory and social repair. Her publications deal with older refugee experiences, care practices within and across borders, aspirations related to a good life and death, local idioms of distress, and the temporal dimensions of displacement.
Dr. Dora Sampaio
(Ph.D. Human Geography, Sussex) is Assistant Professor at the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Utrecht University. She is also research associate with the Max Planck Research Group ‘Ageing in a Time of Mobility’. Her research interests are on aging, migration, transnational families, care and the life course. She co-edited a Special Issue of the journal Areaon ageing and migration. She is author of Migration, Diversity and Inequality in Later Life: Ageing at a Crossroads (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), an ethnography of migrants aging in the Portuguese islands of the Azores.
M.A. Nele Wolter
(M.A. in Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Göttingen) is a Doctoral Fellow with the ‘Ageing in a Time of Mobility’ Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. She is also associated with the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Mainz. Her dissertation focuses on how anglophone internally displaced Cameroonians reconfigure their everyday lives in makeshift homes in the francophone part of the country.
Dr. Swetlana Torno
(PhD Social and Cultural Anthropology, Heidelberg University) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Max Planck Research Group ‘Ageing in a Time of Mobility’. She also serves as a convener of the Age and Generations Network (AGENET) of the European Association of Social Anthropologists since 2022. Her research focuses on ageing, mobility, intergenerational relations, care, and gender in Central Asia and appeared in international journals such as Acta Via Serica and Central Asian Affairs.
To read more about the group, our publications and events, please visit our institutional webpage:
We are a Max Planck Research Group funded by the Max Planck Society and hosted at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany.
Max-Planck-Institut
Zur Erforschung multireligiöser und multiethnischer Gesellschaften
Designed, illustrated, curated and implemented by Álvaro Gabriel Martínez