This book is about ageing in Bulgaria. How do Bulgaria’s elderly―abandoned by the state and left behind by their adult children and grandchildren―adapt to their continuously shifting environment and a state of perpetual uncertainty? Drawing on dozens of interviews with older people in Bulgaria’s capital Sofia as well as a village in the Bulgarian Balkans, Iossifova unravels how the dramatic socio-political transitions of the past eighty years have influenced the lifecourse of older people today. She carefully traces their patterns of everyday life in order to draw out the mechanisms through which older people cope with their meagre pensions, sustain their ailing bodies and make do in their tattered homes. Iossifova argues that ‘ageing in place’ as a popular paradigm underpinning neoliberal policy agendas has no place in Bulgaria and the wider Global East, where translocal ageing is the norm.
Author(s): Deljana Iossifova
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 146
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Ageing in Bulgaria
Global Transformations, Bulgarian Challenges
From ‘Ageing in Place’ to Age-Relationality
Discovering Ecosystems of Ageing
Locating Ageing in the City and in the Village
Structure of the Book
References
Chapter 2: Lives in Broad Strokes: Navigating Transitions, Disruptions and Uncertainty
From the Village to the City: The State Takes Care of Everybody and Everything
The Long March to Freedom: Adjusting to a New Status Quo
Expectations, Identities, Roles: Finding Agency Under Uncertainty
Conclusions
References
Chapter 3: Doing Everyday Life: Patterns, Resources and Adaptive Mechanisms
Theories of Change and Adaptation in Ageing
Patterns of Everyday Life
Managing Meagre Pensions
Sustaining Ailing Bodies
Making Do in Tattered Homes
Conclusions
References
Chapter 4: Dislocating ‘Ageing in Place’: From Multi-local to Transnational
Rethinking Place in Ageing
Navigating Familiar Places
Transformations ‘in Place’
Between the City and the Village
Becoming Transnational
Conclusions
References
Chapter 5: Trajectories of Ageing: Learning (from) the Global East
Lifecourse, Everyday Life and Translocal Geographies of Ageing Under Uncertainty
Resolving the Dogma of ‘Ageing in Place’
Learning (from) the Global East
Reflections on Methodology
In Closing
References
Index
