As the global older population continues to expand, new issues and concerns arise for consideration by academics, policy makers and health and social care professionals worldwide. Ageing in a Global Context is a series of books, published by Policy Press in association with the British Society of Gerontology, which aims to influence and transform debates in what has become a fast-moving field in research and policy. The series seeks to achieve this in three main ways. First, through publishing books which rethink the key questions shaping debates in the study of ageing. This has become especially important given the restructuring of welfare states alongside the complex nature of population change, with both elements opening up the need to explore themes which go beyond traditional perspectives in social gerontology. Second, the series represents a response to the impact of globalisation and related processes, thus contributing to the erosion of the national boundaries which originally framed the study of ageing. From this has come the emergence of issues explored in various contributions to the series; for example, the impact of cultural diversity, transnational migration, new forms of inequality, environmental issues and ageing, and related developments. Third, a key aim of the series is to explore interdisciplinary connections in gerontology. Contributions will provide a critical assessment of the disciplinary boundaries and territories influencing the study of ageing, creating in the process new perspectives and approaches relevant to the 21st century.

Given the aims of the series, we are especially pleased to include a study which connects research in social gerontology with advances in scholarship in the field of ethnicity. Research focusing on issues relating to ethnicity has, especially in the case of Europe, tended to remain on the margins of work in the field of ageing. However, there is now some urgency in making ethnicity a core area of research in social gerontology. Demographic change will itself be a central driver in this process, with ethnic diversity increasingly characteristic of older as much as younger populations. But the broader social changes are equally important, in particular those associated with the rise of transnational communities, the impact of global migration, the influence of different ethnic groups on neighbourhoods and communities, and the complex interaction between ethnicity and other key social statuses – notably age, class, gender and sexuality.