Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic study examines mothers' decisions to leave a conflict zone with their children for Greece. Their narratives reveal the complex interplay between maternal protection, establishing temporary routines abroad, and thoughts of return, while partners remain at home.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores mothers' critical decision to leave their homes with their children following an outbreak of conflict, while their partners remained behind in Israel. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Evia, Greece, including participant observation, 14 in-depth interviews, and social media analysis, this research examines three interconnected aspects: the decision-making process to leave, the creation of temporary daily routines abroad, and the ongoing contemplation of return.

The study reveals how these middle-class mothers frame their departure as an act of maternal protection, choosing to prioritize their children's physical and emotional safety despite the personal cost of family separation. While their relative privilege enabled this choice, they still face significant challenges in creating temporary lives abroad. The research documents how these women establish daily routines in Greece - organizing informal education, creating support networks, and maintaining connections with home through digital means - all while living in a state of perpetual temporariness.

Their experiences highlight the complex emotional landscape of protective migration: the relief of providing safety for their children mixed with guilt about leaving, the effort to create stability in temporary circumstances, and the constant question of when to return. The research contributes to understanding how mothers make decisions about children's safety in conflict situations, while offering insights into the creation of temporary lives and the ongoing negotiation of return.

Paper short abstract:

This paper demonstrates how mothers living in liminality in status, time and space navigate motherhood in the context of precarious migration through particular ways of ‘doing’ friendship, and how spaces and places both facilitate and constrain these friendship practices.

Paper long abstract:

Women and mothers who migrate abroad often face an array of challenges, including separation from support networks, becoming a (single) mother, precarious immigration status, poor-quality accommodation, financial hardship, racial minoritization, language barriers, and hypermobility whilst also feeling ‘stuck’. The intersection of these factors creates particular kinds of support needs. This paper brings together findings from two ethnographic studies: first, mothers and their children living in a reception centre in Belgium having fled war in Ukraine, and second, mothers from different countries with insecure immigration status living with their children in a neighbourhood in London, UK. We argue that mothers living in liminality - in status, time and space - navigate motherhood post-migration through particular ways of ‘doing’ friendship. We highlight the importance of practical and material help in friendship practices, whilst underlining the need to exercise caution or ‘hold back’ in developing friendships. Additionally, we show how the physical spaces in which mothers live and interact with others shape how they do friendship. We demonstrate how different types of shared living spaces constrain friendship practices by embodying liminality and ‘stuckedness’ (Hage 2015). We also consider how different kinds of ‘social infrastructure’ (Klinenberg 2018, Small and Adler 2019) present opportunities to form and sustain friendships by offering temporary relief from liminality and creating a sense of belonging. This paper contributes to understandings of the roles of motherhood and domestic and social spaces in shaping friendship and support practices in the context of precarious migration.

Paper short abstract:

In the UK, asylum seekers are dependent on a form of state support that mandates inhabitancy of precarious and temporary housing. In this context, mobilizing suffering through social networks is a way for mothers to request better living conditions from the state.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, the provision of asylum housing has emerged as an extension of the UK's migration governance agenda, mapping onto the iteration of bordering techniques introduced by the so called British “hostile environment”. Forced to inhabit temporal and precarious accommodations while they wait for a resolution of their claim, mothers in the asylum system believe that current housing politics are built with the purpose of “making people sick, so that they leave”. In this context, mobilizing suffering becomes a means to request better living conditions from the state. As mothers seek letters of medical evidence to have a say in where and how they live, their stories of affliction become a way to trace the different ways in which care structures the possibilities and impossibilities for migrant life in the UK. Their testimonies of illness and affliction map how asylum politics fold into the domestic space, becoming inscribed in their children’s bodies, but they also weave together the care practices, relations and trajectories mothers engage with when material and physical infrastructures of state care provision fail. Their evidence speaks to questions of claiming care and forging ways to care through the social networks they thread with health care providers, charity workers, volunteers and other asylum seekers living in hotel rooms. This paper considers how, in capturing the harmful effects of asylum housing, mothers index the forms of care they negotiate everyday to repair harm and contest the exclusionary logics of bordering Britain by making their families sick.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of social infrastructures in shaping the experiences of return migrant mothers in Mexico City and how these mothers navigate social, economic and familial transitions in a context of urban inequality, highlighting disparities in accessibility due to social class.

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, migration between the United States and Mexico has undergone a major transformation. More Mexicans have returned from the US than have migrated there, with a particularly high proportion of female returnees in Mexico’s capital. Among them are many mothers from different social backgrounds who have returned to, with or without their children, either voluntarily or by force. Some of them settle in the wealthy western and central districts of the city, where most of the economic and cultural activity is concentrated. Others can only afford to rent in the eastern periphery, which is severely affected by poverty and where urban infrastructure and services are more precarious. While mothers from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds can usually fall back on pre-existing networks and nurturing environments, working-class mothers are often on their own and have to cope with a landscape of social, economic and psychological vulnerability. Given the lack of public assistance for this rather unusual migrant community, it is primarily returnee organisations that can provide spaces of social encounter and support systems for navigating economic and familial transitions. Based on one-year ethnographic fieldwork among return migrants in Mexico City, this paper explores how social infrastructures shape maternal perceptions of return, and of the place itself. By considering how (in)accessibility to these spaces is mediated by social class, it works towards a better understanding of the complex ways return migrant mothers orient themselves in contexts of social and spatial (im)mobility when reorganising their lives and those of their children.

Paper short abstract:

For Amira, taking the bus every morning was a dreaded yet necessary part of her everyday life. This paper explores the social infrastructures that refugee women as mothers occupy in the East of England. I will examine the bus, as a space that is both desired and rejected by refugee mothers.

Paper long abstract:

Social infrastructures (Klinenberg 2018) have been ethnographically studied across different urban and rural spaces as places that allow people to settle and thrive, and where social connections are constructed and enabled (e.g. Wessendorf and Gembus 2024). They can include libraries, parks or schools, among others. In this paper I will reflect on the social infrastructures that refugee mothers who had been settled in the UK for several years occupied and as well as the spaces they could not occupy. Over recent years there has been an increased research focus on ‘arrival infrastructures’ for asylum-seekers. In this paper I will examine the social infrastructures that refugee women as mothers used in two cities in the East of England, including charity women’s groups, churches or English language schools, and the bus. I will focus on the latter, the bus as a desired and loathed space. I will focus on the case of Amira who had to take two buses every day to drop her children at school. The bus became a place that allowed her to access her children’s education and where she met her best friend, who overheard her speaking in Arabic. However, for Amira the bus represents everything she does not like about her precarious life in England, and a place she does not wish to occupy. In this paper, I argue that social infrastructures are not always desired and how this tension plays in refugee women’s lives.

Paper short abstract:

Many asylum-seeking women in the UK are separated from their children, or mired in a legal limbo that precludes them from experiencing motherhood. This paper considers how older asylum seekers transcend state oppression to enact motherwork and shape social infrastructures familiar to them.

Paper long abstract:

What does mothering look like when women are prevented from inhabiting the same spatiotemporal realities as their children or grandchildren? For asylum-seeking women who have been denied the opportunity to become mothers after decades of being trapped in bureaucratic encounters with the state, how do they engage in maternal practices that challenge the heteropatriarchal view of the nuclear family unit? My paper addresses these questions by offering reflections from long-term ethnographic fieldwork with asylum-seeking women across the UK. Some of these women are in their 50s or 60s — an age group that often slips through the gaps in migration scholarship — and were separated from their children / grandchildren during the process of forced displacement, or unable to pursue motherhood for a variety of reasons including complex trauma partly attributable to their liminal immigration statuses. I lean on the intersectional perspectives embodied in the concept of motherwork (Hill-Collins 1994, 2000) to understand how maternal responsibilities may be carried out by these women in the physical absence of children, often in unexpected ways that defy state constraints. Motherwork by older women in the asylum process also presents an alternative approach to hegemonic ideals of parenting that centre on individualism and financial self-reliance (Dow 2019). I discuss how motherwork within and in spite of absence and invisibility can be deeply meaningful for women disenfranchised by the asylum process, as it offers them reciprocal power as agents of care and change within the social infrastructure(s) set up to support them.

Paper short abstract:

Utilizing qualitative data, the study investigates how the social infrastructures of the Christian Fellowship provide crucial spiritual and emotional support to young mothers who endured captivity under Boko Haram and managed to escape

Paper long abstract:

Traditional migration studies often centre on the role of place and arrival infrastructures for migrants in foreign countries. This paper shifts the focus to internally displaced persons (IDPs), exploring the concept of place and arrival infrastructures within the context of the International Christian Centre in Nigeria. Utilizing qualitative data, the study investigates how the social infrastructures of the Christian Fellowship provide crucial spiritual and emotional support to young mothers who endured captivity under Boko Haram and managed to escape. Specifically, it highlights how spaces like the Christian Fellowship become arenas for recovery, resilience, and the cultivation of agency. By examining the intersection of faith, community, and recovery, this paper contributes to the discourse on social infrastructures, illustrating how faith-based spaces foster recovery and resilience for IDPs navigating trauma in their daily lives.

Key Words: Social Infrastructure, Place, Motherhood, Christian Fellowship, Trauma

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines, through the lens of the house biography method, how everyday practices of home-making in post-flood displacement (central Mozambique) are transforming motherhood and female roles in terms of temporality, spatiality, materiality, and new social entitlements, relations, claims.

Paper long abstract:

Homes are 'hierarchically structured' spaces of material and moral possibilities. The process of home-making is clearly gendered, as the everyday routines of social and spatial ordering within the home are deeply linked to gender identities.

Under conditions of enforced material, temporal, social and symbolic disruption of the everyday and domestic, such as repeated experiences of severe flooding combined with multifaceted conditions of poverty, home-making and house-building together reveal the complex life trajectories enacted within (and without) them.

In liminal settings of disruption and house re-building, such as resettlement sites, a material and imaginary 'other' is enacted and a more mobile, hermetic and symbolic notion of home emerges.

At the same time, a reimagined life trajectory and a materialised everyday emerge. At the intersection of these statuses, the identities, roles and rights of motherhood, womanhood and kinship are reframed, reenacted and performed within the broader reframing of the altered home-house-place nexus.

This paper, based on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in post-cyclone central Mozambique funded by the Marie Skłodowska Curie Programme, proposes a critical reflection on maternal roles and their material and spatial expression in a highly structured and politicised resettlement site in the Sofala region.

Using the house biographical method, in which orality and materiality of the everyday are explored simultaneously, it focuses on how housing building practices and the everyday materials, sensory experiences and echoes of home are forcibly altering the claims, identities and perceptions of social risk of single women and mothers, and reframing relationships, claims and dependencies.

Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork in Tunisia among mothers in transit, this paper reconceptualizes concepts of safety and wellbeing in relation to children, considering how the experience of motherhood changes when a child is considered as the source of protection for other adults during migration journeys.

Paper long abstract:

Tunisia has been emerging as a key country of transit in Mediterranean migration routes for close to a decade, and in 2023 surpassed Libya as the primary 'departure point' towards Italy. This article draws from recent fieldwork in Tunisia among pregnant women and mothers in transit from Cameroon, Guinea, Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire. I discuss the parameters of ‘safety’ and ‘wellbeing’ in profoundly unsafe circumstances, and the sources of primarily spiritual support – in the absence of meaningful social infrastructures - to which these women related. Among mothers who had previously attempted to leave Tunisia by boat with their children, the role of the child (including unborn children) emerged as central to the perceived safety and protection of other adults attempting to reach Italy.

In this paper, I discuss how women living in conditions of extraordinary precarity in transit in Tunisia strive to create conditions of safety for their children. I put forward a reconceptualization of the concepts of safety and wellbeing in relation to children on the move with their mothers, that accounts for the changing experience of motherhood when a child is considered as a primary source of protection for other adults on a migration journey. Finally, in the course of this research, the mothers I engaged with formed a group to exchange resources and information. This paper also reflects on motherhood research as praxis, as well as my positionality as a mother, doing this fieldwork with a young child.

Paper short abstract:

Afghan women making state-unauthorised overland journeys through Serbia to seek safety in the European Union continue to experience pregnancy and new motherhood while on the move, yet social infrastructures can reproduce harms as well as offer safety, impacting their mobility and their wellbeing.

Paper long abstract:

Serbia is a country through which forcibly displaced Afghans commonly pass, when travelling overland without state authorisation to seek international protection in western European Union (EU) countries. Pregnancy and new motherhood continue for unknown numbers of Afghan women who transit through Serbia. Drawing on ethnographic research I conducted between 2021 and 2022, and applying a decolonial feminist lens, I show how new motherhood ruptured Afghan women’s onward mobility, and the impact of these ruptures for themselves and their newborns. I foreground how social infrastructures and spaces occupied by Afghan mothers on the move through Serbia played contradictory roles in facilitating / decelerating onward movement and supporting / harming mothers and their newborns. These contradictions were caused largely by the trickling down of racialised EU migration policy that ultimately shaped the everyday experiences of Afghan expectant and new mothers occupying spaces that often failed to provide respite, safety, and support at a critical juncture in their lives. Increased controls enacted by the Serbian state over social infrastructure accessed by refugees, in addition to reduced funding for non-state-led social infrastructure, reduced spaces available to Afghan mothers for social connectivity and rest in between journeys. Contrary to hegemonic discourses among state and non-state actors, my research found that motherhood could for some Afghan women, provide hope, a welcome distraction, and raison d’ệtre, during a time of otherwise significant disruption and uncertainty.

Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper reflects on the everyday experiences of motherhood and the interpersonal relations within social infrastructures among Latin-American immigrant women as mothers of young children living in a Chilean intercultural city.

Paper long abstract:

This paper describes and reflects on everyday experiences of motherhood based on an ongoing ethnography accompanying ten low-income immigrant women as mothers of young children living in an intercultural and centric Chilean city.

These women experience permanent movement. Besides moving from abroad, they experience change and movement within the new country because of precarious job and housing conditions. While in a vital crisis, “luchar con capa y espada” reflects their disposition to face everyday life and “salir adelante.” In this context, they navigate the different forms of social infrastructures experiencing ambiguity. On the one hand, public healthcare and childcare places provide vital structure and containment, where also significant relationships that hold critical affective meaning emerge. On the other hand, within such places, they also experience both norms that feel coercive and meaningless and latent tension with the local population. In such context, my ethnographic work also shows the invisibilization of their social and cultural origins and meanings within systems that face high service demands and focus on responding to the normative contexts.

This paper also reflects on my own experiences – as a woman, mother and physician ethnographer– while accompanying the intimacy of women and building a relationship with them. I reflect on fieldwork tensions that, by questioning what I bring into the relationships, had brought light into my own journey towards embracing uncertainty in fieldwork and acknowledging the relevance of relating from a sense of profound respect and reciprocity towards the women I accompany.