This paper focuses on older Turkish labour migrants and their spouses, who mostly came to Vienna as young adults in the 1960s and thereafter. They are now entering retirement age and constitute a significant part of Vienna’s older population. I analyse their understandings of transnational ageing, their social ties and feelings of social embeddedness. For those still mobile, active participation in one of Vienna’s Turkish cultural/religious/political associations is identified as a particular source of social embeddedness. I argue that these voluntary associations provide an important place for older migrants to strengthen social ties and are relatively easy to access, including in old age. Nevertheless, I demonstrate that older Turkish labour migrants are exposed to several forms of discrimination, some of which are felt especially strongly in old age, including a lack of adequate institutionalised late life care. In the discussion of the paper, I critically revisit the debate on ethnicity as a resource versus ethnicity as a vulnerability factor in old age. I argue that this debate is misleading since it camouflages other central social categories and relations. I conclude by suggesting closer attention be paid to the specific but multiple generational experiences of older labour migrants and their spouses.

Nostalgia for Yugoslavia is a social phenomenon which prevails in present-day Mostar as well as elsewhere in the Yugoslav successor states. Even if attempts are made by the elites of local politics to erase traces of the Yugoslav past (especially in Croat dominated West Mostar), a good part of Mostar's population still nostalgically remembers that period. Until recently, nostalgia has been neglected as a subject of research in the social sciences and has been acknowledged - if at all - only as a phenomenon oriented towards the past. Recent studies, however, have emphasized a utopian character of nostalgia. It is particularly interesting to further investigate this aspect in the context of post-socialism. This paper discusses the selected narratives of two women whom I encountered during my fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2008, and their relationship to Yugoslavia. It is shown that differences in their narratives can be related to their nationality and family backgrounds, but to the same degree - if not more so - to their age and the stage in life they are in. At the end of the paper I shall tackle the question whether nostalgia for Yugoslavia can hold as a potential vision for a better future and, if so, under which conditions

Many of Vienna’s labor migrants who entered Austria as so-called “guest workers” together with their spouses long nurtured the dream of returning to their country of origin, at the latest when they retired. By then, however, returning became less than straightforward leading to ambivalence regarding questions of belonging/return and transnational mobility and late-life care. Based on rich qualitative data, in this article, I show that ambivalences are found in the complexity of migrants’ narratives, particularly in the way they (1) reassess past choices, (2) negotiate feelings of belonging, and (3) assess future options for late life and care. I argue that the social dimension of ambivalence, which I term “relational ambivalence,” is crucial to understanding the labor migrants’ experiences, reflections, and choices. The analysis shows that ambivalence must be understood as a product of relationships rather than solely an individual experience. The concept of relational ambivalence captures these social and discursive dimensions of ambivalence. The article ultimately carves out the particularity of ambivalence in the general context of migration and in the specific context of Vienna’s labor migrants, while accepting feelings of ambivalence or the simultaneity of different, opposing positions in one and the same person as a core human experience.