Title: Storying Life Courses for Intersectional Inclusion: Ethnicity and Wellbeing Across Time and Place
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: This change-oriented project aims to transform both understanding of inclusive ageing, and the prospects for new policy and practice approaches to achieve it. It is a timely and bold interdisciplinary effort to push the boundaries of knowledge, methods and policy and practice regarding Black, Asian and Minoritised Ethnic and Refugee groups and the potential for their greater inclusion. The expert project team is a unique cross-sector collaboration. Within the University of Sheffield, the proposal brings together the Healthy Lifespan Institute, the Centre for International Research on Care, Labour & Equalities and the Migration Research Group. This University of Sheffield team is further strengthened by the inclusion of a number of key external partners. These consist of: Co-Investigators from the University of Liverpool, the Office of National Statistics (Ethnicity, Language & Religion, Social Care and Demography / Ageing teams), Rotherham Ethnic Minority Alliance and Sheffield and District African Caribbean Community Association; and 11 Project Partners spanning local Black, Asian and Minoritised Ethnic and Refugee community organisations in Rotherham and Sheffield, third sector organisations working with older people and community arts associations. The project's objectives are: 1. To work in partnership with Black, Asian and Minoritised Ethnic and Refugee communities and other key stakeholders to critically interrogate dominant understandings of social inclusion/exclusion in order to re-imagine and reconceptualise them from this specific grounded perspective. 2. To develop creative, inclusive and adaptive approaches to research, dissemination and impact, so as to centre the lived experiences of Black, Asian and Minoritised Ethnic and Refugee older people as a strategy of recognising experiences that have been devalued and ignored in ageing research, policy and practice. 3. To work across disciplinary boundaries, adopting an intersectional life course approach and innovative methods, to develop new understandings of the causes of ethnic inequalities in social inclusion / exclusion and levels of wellbeing in later-life, including their place-based dynamics. This will involve exploiting the potential of existing datasets and administrative data linkages (in collaboration with our Co-I, the Office of National Statistics), as well as the production of new data to develop a contextualised and nuanced understanding of intersectional life course inclusions / exclusions. We will use the Open Science Framework to facilitate future exploitation of the project data by policymakers and other researchers. 4. To co-produce with key stakeholders, including Black, Asian and Minoritised Ethnic and Refugee older people, creative steps for policy and practice interventions at micro, meso and macro levels to prevent the risk of exclusion and promote inclusive ageing. 5. To build capacity across the whole project team - Co-Is (academic, third-sector and government), Researchers, Project Partners, Community Researchers and Voice Forum members - through a bespoke programme of knowledge exchange, skills training and personal development, with an emphasis on furnishing opportunities for mutual learning across disciplines and sectors.

Lay abstract: The current prominence of the Black Lives Matter Movement, along with evidence of the unequal morbidity, mortality and socio-economic impacts of Covid-19, have highlighted the entrenched and systemic ethnic and racialised inequalities in UK society. These have a detrimental impact on older members of the Black, Asian and Minoritised Ethnic and Refugee (BAMER)* population, as well as on its younger members. Indeed, the two are inseparable, as racialised experiences of inequality and exclusion encountered in earlier years, accumulate over the life course, resulting in significant ethnic inequalities in later life across a range of social outcomes. Research and policy agendas designed to foster more inclusive ageing scenarios for the population at large have gained traction in recent years, albeit against a backdrop of prevailing societal ageism as a system of inequality and a major form of exclusion. Such agendas have increasingly acknowledged the importance of a life course perspective for inclusive ageing, understanding later-life positionings as cumulative of advantage and disadvantage over time. Older people's life courses, however, have been treated in quite homogenised ways. This means that in prevailing conceptualisations of inclusive ageing, vital intersections between ageing and ethnicity, and between ageism and racism, have been missed. This timely and bold project will plug that fundamental knowledge gap. Its key aim is to critically interrogate accepted interpretations of social inclusion/exclusion in order to reconceptualise them from the perspective of the BAMER population's life courses, and to employ this reconceptualisation as the basis for a new understanding of inclusive ageing and the steps needed to achieve it. As with the older population, the BAMER population is diverse in itself, with dynamic and multidimensional identities and experiences mediated by for example, gender, socio-economic position, migration background, sexuality, religion and disability. In this project, therefore, we take an 'intersectional life course' approach, unpacking experiences within the BAMER population. We also focus on the important role that place plays in shaping intersectional life course experiences. This includes the material resources available in local places, such as housing and social care, as well as the sense of attachment, belonging and identity places engender or not. For those with a migration background, place is likely to be multi-sited, with experiences in the place of residence produced and re-produced in relation to places elsewhere. With the high-impact ambition of re-imagining socially inclusive ageing policies and practices, the project's interdisciplinary team (spanning Social Gerontology, Sociology, Geography, Social Policy, Social Anthropology, Race and Ethnicity Studies, Migration Studies and Public Health) of highly experienced academic investigators will research in partnership with BAMER groups and other key local and national stakeholders. These are included variously in the project as Co-investigators, Policy & Practice Partners, Community Researchers, Voice Forum and Stakeholder Platform members. In undertaking impactful co-produced research, we will centre the lived experience of BAMER older people, employing a creative 'storying' approach throughout the project. This will give us a participant-led, inclusive and adaptive way of developing knowledge with those who have experienced exclusion and/or exploitation. Through an innovative combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, we will co-construct a more pluralistic and inclusive knowledge-base and provide a catalyst for change, identifying creative policy and practice steps at micro, meso and macro levels to prevent the risks of exclusion and to promote inclusive ageing. *We prefer to use the term "Black, Asian and Minoritised Ethnic and Refugee" in full, but space constrains us.

Research activity codes: 1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES;1.5 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (UNDERPINNING)
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE