Beyond borders: exploring ageing in a global context

It is with great pleasure and no small sense of relief that I sit down to write this editorial piece, on behalf of the whole editorial team, for the first issue of the Journal of Global Ageing (JoGA).We had three interlinked motivations for setting up JoGA: to understand the global processes of ageing and provide a forum which represents the global nature of population ageing -in particular we are keen to encourage submissions relating to those countries and regions that are currently under-represented in our field; to invite authors to move beyond the methodological nationalism that dominates much of social gerontology and consider a range of different (social, material and environmental) geographies of ageing and later life; and to develop a more compassionate, supportive experience for all involved in the publication process in this field.We are all aware that global demography is changing.Ageing societies were once exclusively situated in high-income countries and, with the exception of Japan, located in Europe and North America.Today, countries in the so-called 'Global South' (see Kowalski, 2021, for definition of Global North and Global South) are experiencing rapid population ageing and are expected to account for 80 per cent of the world's older people by 2050.Alongside this demographic change, there are a number of social, technological and environmental changes that are having an impact on older adults around the world.Despite this, our current understanding of ageing is dominated by research that comes from countries in the so-called 'Global North'.As the results of some, albeit relatively crude, analysis of data from Web of Science show, articles from the US dominate the gerontological literature (Figure 1).In the past five years, 37 per cent of all gerontology journal articles originated in the US.Aside from this, we can see that in the top 15 countries where gerontology articles originated, there were only 6 outside Europe and North America and only 3 outside the high-income countries in what is considered to be the Global North.Articles from high-income countries comprised 80 per cent of all gerontology articles, and articles from North America and Europe comprised 69 per cent.However, as Table 1 shows, high-income countries and countries in North America plus Europe and Central Asia have only around 30 per cent of the world's older population.Our goal is that JoGA will help to redress this imbalance and provide a forum for authors from around the world to publish their studies on ageing.