On 1 february 2024 the next online book talk within the Unfolding Finitudes series will take place. This edition the book Aspiring in Later Life: Movements across Time, Space, and Generations will be introduced by the editors, Dr. Megha Amrith, Dr. Victoria K. Sakti and Dr. Doria Sampaio and two of the volume’s contributing authors, Dr. Alfonso Otaegui and Dr. Harmandeep Gill.
Participation is free and open for all. Please register via the event page.
In our highly interconnected and globalized world, people often pursue their aspirations in multiple places. Yet in public and scholarly debates, aspirations are often seen as the realm of younger, mobile generations, since they are assumed to hold the greatest potential for shaping the future. This volume flips this perspective on its head by exploring how aspirations are constructed from the vantage point of later life, and shows how they are pursued across time, space, and generations. The aspirations of older people are diverse, and relate not only to aging itself but also to planning the next generation’s future, preparing an “ideal” retirement, searching for intimacy and self-realization, and confronting death and afterlives. Aspiring in Later Life brings together rich ethnographic cases from different regions of the world, offering original insights into how aspirations shift over the course of life and how they are pursued in contexts of translocal mobility.