WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO AGE WELL? EXPERIENCES OF OLDER MIGRANT CAREGIVERS IN ITALY

Italy is the second-oldest country in the world. Persistently low birth rates and a rapidly ageing population make it a crucial context for examining contemporary processes of ageing and their consequences. One of the most pressing implications of demographic ageing is the growing demand for long-term care. In Italy, within a familistic Mediterranean welfare regime, this demand is largely met through family-based arrangements that increasingly rely on migrant labour, particularly women. Migrant women constitute the backbone of elderly care in Italy, and a growing number of them are now ageing within the care sector itself. Many continue to work in elder care well into later life, and sometimes even beyond retirement age, often caring for Italian older people who are, paradoxically, of a similar age or only slightly older than themselves. This research emerges from this underexplored scenario and asks: What does it mean for migrant women caregivers to age well? How do they imagine, experience, and make sense of their own ageing while working in elder care? Drawing on a feminist and decolonial framework applied to an intersectional life course perspective, the study is based on 60 in-depth interviews and ten months of participant observation conducted in five Italian cities—Venice, Padua, Bologna, Modena, and Naples. The thesis addresses a significant gap in the literature by focusing on the ageing experiences of older migrant caregivers in Italy. It explores the narratives through which participants interpret their lives, their work, and their ageing processes. These narratives are approached as situated and interpretive constructions. Through this lens, the analysis examines how ageing is narrated, imagined, and given meaning from specific positionalities. The findings show that ageing is not a uniform or universal experience, but one profoundly shaped by the interplay of social, cultural, economic, contextual, and personal factors, as well as by intersecting identities and structural inequalities. The specific positionality of older migrant caregivers gives rise to a distinctive understanding of later life, which this study conceptualizes as a situated view of ageing. Caregivers’ narratives illuminate both the aspirations and constraints that shape their visions of ageing well, while also exposing the contradictions and inequalities embedded in welfare arrangements that structure later life, raising broader questions about social protection, recognition, and inequality in ageing societies.