October 14th 2014, 2:15 – 4:00 pm UNI Rokkan centre, Nygårdsgaten 5, Bergen (6. etg.)
Aging of the population raises a series of different challenges for the Norwegian elderly care system. One of the challenges is related to user differentiation, that is, the understanding that services should be adapted to each user’s individual needs. Related to this emphasis on user differentiation is an increasing cultural diversity amongst the elderly population as cohorts of labour migrants and refugees that came in the 1960s and 1970s are facing old age. This necessitates more knowledge about how these elderly migrants perceive of old age, and particularly how they experience and perceive Norwegian care services. This paper addresses how elderly immigrants with a Pakistani and Polish background perceive of aging in Norway, and how they experience and relate to the Norwegian welfare and care regime. What are their expectations? How do they go about covering their assistance needs, both formally (within the public welfare system) and informally (within their family and/or the community).
Katrine Mellingen Bjerke is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology, at the University of Bergen. She is also associated with IMER Bergen. Her PhD project explores how elderly migrants perceive of the public elderly care services in Norway.
ation will centre on my PhD thesis – a thesis that I according to plans will defend 7 November this year at the University of Bergen. The thesis presents an examination of the US television serial 24’s representation of Muslim characters, and it explores to what extent the perception of these characters can be determined by the cultural and ethnic belonging of the audience. The main reason for choosing to study 24 exclusively is that after 9/11 the serial played a central role in the public debate about whether Muslims are being stereotyped in US 
