This chapter draws attention to three identification grounds that social workers are expected to consider and that policy makers see as a priority, that is, ethnicity, race and migrancy. One of the reasons why this is the case is that the globalisation of international migration is one of the greatest challenges many societies have been facing in recent decades (Torres and Lawrence, 2012; Lawrence and Torres, 2016; Torres and Karl, 2016). As a result of this, social workers must now address the challenges that increased diversity can pose. In the case of those who specialise in ageing and older people, referred to in this book as gerontological social workers, it is important to note that population ageing has also increased the number of older people who need eldercare services. Thus, gerontological social workers have to deal with both the challenges that population ageing poses and the ones that the globalisation of international migration presents. Their work is therefore impacted upon by two major societal trends that most societies are facing these days, which is why this book proposes that critical gerontology could offer a valuable tool to advance research and increase the user-friendliness of social work policy and practice as far as our ageing populations are concerned.

Gerontological social work practice needs to accommodate and respond to greater heterogeneity among older people and it is in this context that this book introduces the critical gerontology lens to social workers. This is, after all, a lens that is particularly helpful when one wants to engage in research, policy and/or practice in a heterogeneity-informed way. Thus, this chapter deals specifically with the source of heterogeneity that ethnicity, race and migrancy bring to the table, and does so because demographic data is clearly showing that ethnic, racial and migrant minorities are slowly but surely increasing in numbers across the world, with subsequent implications to population ageing. According to the Migration Data Portal (2021), there are, for example, 258 million international migrants in the world, and 11 per cent of them are 65+ years old. If one lowers the age threshold to 60+ – which is what the United Nations recommends when designing policy to address the needs of ageing populations – one can establish that 12 per cent of them are considered older migrants.

A global transformation is taking place as the world's population is rapidly ageing and, for the first time in history, most people can expect to live into their 60s and beyond. It is therefore understandable that one of the latest reports written by the Population Division of the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs begins with the following statement:

While the demographic shift that we call population ageing started in highincome countries, low-and middle-income countries are experiencing the greatest change now (WHO, 2015). As a demographic transition, population ageing is of interest and concern to scholars, policy makers and practitioners in an array of spheres, since the rapid ageing of populations around the world means that health, labour supply and economic growth-related challenges will arise. This is why population ageing, and the globalisation of international migration, are societal trends that all of us who are involved in gerontological research, policy and practice must reckon with (Lawrence and Torres, 2016; Torres, 2019). Both trends are, of course, cause for celebration, since the fact that more of us are living to reach advanced old age is an achievement for humankind, and increased diversity can expand our imagination in more ways than we can imagine. An array of challenges are, however, posed by these trends, since they affect not only societies and the welfare systems we rely on to provide us with help in difficult times but also the social work profession in particular.

Working on an edited collection, especially in the midst of a pandemic, with all of the professional and personal challenges that we and our contributors have experienced, has been challenging, but also more stimulating than we had anticipated. An edited collection is always a collective effort that is often generated through a series of serendipitous moments, and when one works along with so many scholars who also have a background as social workers one cannot help but feel energised. When reflecting on how this book came to be, we can, however, clearly trace its original conceptualisation back to April 2018 and the European Conference for Social Work Research that took place in Edinburgh. Discussions during the Special Interest Group for Gerontological Social Work (or the European Network for Gerontological Social Work as it later became known as) identified the need for a book that approached gerontological social work from an angle that aimed to empower social work scholars, policy makers and practitioners. As a group we were frustrated about the lack of status and attention given to social work with older people generally, and, parallel to this, we had concerns relating to ageism experienced by older people in our communities and societies stemming from increased neoliberal, reductionist social policies in many countries across Europe. While there were several excellent published texts relating to social work and older people, we felt that there was gap for a book with a critical lens, which would act as a call to arms to the social work profession, encouraging an embracement of the activist and social justice mandate.

Firstly, we must thank Professor Mo Ray and Professor Marjaana Seppänen for their incredible vision and leadership in establishing the Gerontological Social Work Special Interest Group/European Network for Gerontological Social Work in the first place. We would also like to sincerely thank and acknowledge Marjaana, Professor Janet Anand and Dr Anna Olaison for their important contributions to the initial conceptualisation of this book project. Marjaana spent part of her sabbatical at the Department of Sociology, Uppsala University – which houses the Centre for Social Work – with one of us (Sandra) and together they did the thorough inventory of the book market that is always needed when formulating how the book we were planning would differentiate itself from what was already available.

The chapters in Part 2 are structured such that, initially, they offer an insight as to what the scholarship in focus assumes about their respective topics; after that the results of my theorising exercise are presented to shed light on what the context of the ‘discovery’ divulges (Abbott, 2012; Swedberg, 2012a, 2012b). Worth noting is that this approach is for the benefit of both ethnicity scholars wanting to become acquainted with the nexus in question and for social gerontologists who work on this nexus or want to embark on studies about it. The sections with italicised sub-headings offer detailed information about specific themes for scholars already specialising in one of these areas of research.

As mentioned in the Introduction, the theorising exercise that this book engages in utilises a scoping review of scholarship on the intersection of ethnicity and old age in order to gain insight into the understandings of ethnicity that inform this scholarship. This chapter aims specifically to describe what characterises the portion of this scholarship that focuses on health inequalities (n=117) and has been published during the 20-year period in focus here (see Appendix for details on how the scoping review was conducted). In order to grasp the state of affairs of research before the period in question begins I will give the reader insight into what handbooks, encyclopaedias and edited collections on the intersection of ethnicity and old age describe as givens as far as health inequalities, ethnicity and old age are concerned. It is worth noting that all of these publications are based on US findings, since interest in the intersection of ethnicity and old age as it pertains to health inequalities in other parts of the world seems to have emerged much later (as the coding of the articles conducted while working on the scoping review shows).

One of the things that was often pointed out in the early 1990s in US publications is that older people with minority ethnic/racial backgrounds tend to have poorer health than their majority ethnic counterparts (Gelfand, 2003). This is probably one of the reasons why the topic of health inequalities is the one that has received the most attention during the period covered by the scoping review to be presented in the sections that follow.