Paper short abstract:

Ageing and older people in general are seldom the focus of development practice, policy or theory. This paper explores ageing across households with different socio-economic backgrounds by focusing on older people’s experiences of education, violence and migration and how these are gendered.

Paper long abstract:

The process of ageing and older people in general are seldom the focus of development practice, policy or theory. This paper seeks to begin a discussion about ageing and development, by exploring the process of ageing across households and families that are variously situated across the socio-economic continuum in a Latin American country. Drawing on a project that seeks to address the consequences that migration has for the migrants’ ageing parents, the paper departs from the main focus of the project to address the various fragments of the interviewees’ life stories and experiences that did not fit the original research frame. Invariably, interviewees talked about their life experiences that were not necessarily linked to their children’s migration. Interviewees talked about their experiences of education, violence and their own histories of migration. These experiences were very gendered.

Taking these three ‘topics’ in turn, the paper will explore how ageing, gender and development are intrinsically linked. The older interviewees’ experiences are here offered as a way of doing justice to the stories they have shared and a way of disrupting what development might mean for older people.