Making Viable Lives at the Margins: Ageing, precarity, and political life among Older East Timorese exiles in Indonesia

Victoria Sakti -Book Talk In recent years, precarity has become a central analytic for understanding ageing under conditions of economic insecurity, social marginalisation, and the erosion of care infrastructures across diverse global contexts. Yet as the concept gains prominence in studies of later life, questions remain about how well it captures ageing in settings shaped by long-standing displacement, uneven citizenship, and chronic insecurity. In this talk, I draw on long-term ethnographic research among older East Timorese exiles living in displacement conditions in West Timor, Indonesia, to critically reflect on the usefulness and limits of the notion of ‘precarious ageing’. I argue that ageing in displacement is less defined by the absence of security than by the ongoing labour of making life viable at the margins. Older adults actively work to sustain themselves and others through practices that do not eliminate precarity but reshape how it is lived and endured. These include building and maintaining social networks beyond kin, supporting younger generations’ mobility and future aspirations, and engaging in forms of moral and political labour that assert value, responsibility, and belonging despite persistent marginalisation. By foregrounding these practices, the paper reframes precarious ageing as a dynamic and relational process, highlighting older people’s active participation in social and political life under conditions of displacement. For details of the event please visit:https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/49417/ About the network Older age not only offers profound challenges to societies, it also casts existential issues into sharp relief. Against a backdrop of increasing longevity, changing work lives, declining retirement resources and a looming crisis of care, it is more important now than ever before to develop new knowledge about aging and life course through interdisciplinary conversation and exchange. Just as gender studies revolutionized our understanding of social relations by revealing gender as a fundamental axis of power and difference, critical aging studies demonstrate how age operates as a crucial dimension of social inequality, identity formation, and lived experience. This interdisciplinary network, ‘Precarious Aging: Critical Concepts’, aims to critically examine and reframe the terminology and conceptual frameworks that have shaped our understanding of aging in academic discourse and public policy.  For details of the network and event please visit https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/research/networks/precarious-ageing/