Suchergebnisse

This photo-essay results from three-months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Melilla, a Spanish enclave in the north of Africa, in the framework of the ERC-funded project EU Border Care. It explores how, beyond a highly polarized debate, migration forms the very social fabric of the city. Melilla's economic fate is highly dependent on both regional border crossings and international migration. The 'migration industry' employs border guards and police forces but also social workers, translators, and healthcare professionals. Administratively, this border city can be characterized as a 'central periphery': while some sectors, such as health and education, depend more directly on the central Spanish government than it is the case for other regions, Melilla presents at the same time distinct tax and migration regimes. A regional migration regime facilitates mobility between the enclave and the neighboring Moroccan region of Nador as the movement of people and goods ensures the city's daily life. This photo-essay illustrates how formal borders create sharp cuts within geographical and social continuities. ; The work was supported by the European Research Council-funded project EU Border Care

Available online: 18 December 2018 ; In Greece, Italy, and Spain, austerity policies combined with the structural density of migration flows have had concrete social and material manifestations in the delivery of public health care. Through our ethnographic case studies in Lampedusa and southeastern Sicily, Melilla, and Athens, we examine the maternity care offered to migrant patients in the midst and the aftermath of the so-called "migration crisis" in state and non-state structures. Research was conducted in Athens and southeastern Sicily from August 2016 to August 2017; in Melilla from August 2016 to October 2016 and in January 2017; and in Lampedusa from August 2016 to January 2017. Data collected consist in semi-structured interviews and long-term ethnographic observations. The article explores whether and how the understanding or the labeling of the maternity care of migrants as an emergency within a context of professed crisis generates new norms of care within health-care delivery. Our findings suggest a) the adoption of solutions or practices that in the past might have been considered urgent, ad hoc, or creative; b) their normalization, deeply connected to the wider social landscape of these European peripheries and c) the institutionalization of humanitarianism in the context of these practices. Our research points out temporalities of emergency against the background of a professed migration crisis. In the context of austerity-driven underfunding, temporary solutions become entrenched, producing a lasting emergency. Yet, we argue that "emergency" can, at some point, generate practices of resistance that undermine, subtly yet significantly, its own normalization. ; ERC funded Project EU BORDER CARE 'Intimate Encounters in EU Borderlands: Migrant Maternity, Sovereignty and the Politics of Care on Europe's Periphery' (2015-2020) Grant number 638259

The reproductive care of pregnant migrants entering the European Union via its Mediterranean borders represents an under-examined topic, despite a growing scholarly emphasis on female migrants and the gendered aspects of migration in the past three decades. This article uses ethnographic data gathered in Greece, Italy, and Spain to examine pregnant migrants' experiences of crossing, first reception, and reproductive care. We discuss our findings through the conceptual lens of vulnerability, which we understand as a shifting and relational condition attributed to, or dynamically endorsed by, migrant patients within given social contexts and encounters. We focus on two principal aspects of migrant women's experiences. First, we shed light on their profiles, their journeys to Europe via the three main Mediterranean routes, and the conditions of first reception. Through ethnographic vignettes we examine the diverse ways in which pregnant migrants become vulnerable within these contexts. Second, we turn to the reproductive healthcare they receive in EU borderlands. We explore how declinations of ideas of vulnerability shape the medical encounter between healthcare professionals and migrant women and how vulnerability is dynamically used or contested by migrant patients to engage in meaningful social relations in unpredictable and unstable borderlands. ; This article is based on research conducted as part of the ERC-funded project EU Border Care