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- Convenors:
-
Magdalena Suerbaum
(Bielefeld University)
Laurie Lijnders (SOAS, University of London)
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- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 21 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
Zooming into the lifeworlds of forcibly displaced women who are mothers while struggling with receiving a stable, long-term legal status in their respective host country, we explore their everyday negotiations in the context of reproduction, childbirth and parenting.
Long Abstract:
A growing number of pregnant women, mothers and their children are amongst people from countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, often irregularly crossing sea and land borders with the use of people smugglers to seek asylum in Europe. This panel focuses on their life-worlds and their engagement in mothering practice, while living with a precarious legal status. We explore the ways in which intersecting oppressions impact on mothers who experience asylum and border regimes.
Juggling legal precarity is draining, informs the everyday life immensely and challenges the preservation of emotional intimacy to children who remain in the home country (Madziva & Zontini 2012, Horton 2009). Similarly, structural and institutional barriers in the host country impact on and often complicate women's mothering practices vis-à-vis their accompanying children. At the same time, however, women may find in the relationship to their children a zone of comfort and meaning in a hostile environment (Willen 2014).
Women often became mothers before their arrival to the host country. Consequently, mothering shapes and is an inherent part of their memories of having lived in war-torn countries and of having fled. Thus, when applying the lens of motherhood to the study of forced migration, we get a different perspective on women's decisions and strategies, learning how their forced migration reconfigures their kin ties, senses of personhood and belonging (Grotti 2017).
We invite abstracts that are based on thick ethnographic case studies from different parts of the globe, preferably inspired by phenomenological anthropology.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 21 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
Drawing from Vigh's (2009) concept of 'social navigation' and ethnographic fieldwork in Thessaloniki, Greece, this paper explores the role of motherhood (as both child and parent) in young female refugees' educational goals, imagined futures and agency in an uncertain context.
Paper long abstract:
Contrary to popular media tropes of the 'young, lone, male refugee' arriving at Europe's borders, Greece has in fact seen a steady flow of female refugees arriving since 2015. Most come in family groups, and many - including teenage girls - are mothers. A common aspiration among mothers and female youth is the continuation of schooling; however, enrolment rates among teenagers are low, and drop-out rates are high. While access to education has increased since 2016, currently only half of all secondary-age refugee girls enrol in high school, and of this number, only half attend for longer than one month. However, many engage in alternatives which may better fit their life projects and family responsibilities (as both child and mother).
This paper explores how motherhood is implicated in this educational decision-making and its wider role in imagining and constructing pathways towards their futures. It is based on findings of a DPhil project which explores how young refugees - many of whom have arrived in Greece by crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey - now find themselves in an uncertain, precarious 'seascape' which they are forced to navigate, amidst a plethora of competing social forces. The paper thus draws from Vigh's (2009) concept of 'social navigation' and ethnographic fieldwork in Thessaloniki, Northern Greece to address the influence of motherhood on (achieving) educational goals, while also making the case for including the 'spatial' in educational research; or how (young) refugee women carve out their own educational spaces in the city as an important expression of agency.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on research in Kenya and the UK, this paper examines the relationship between processes of care and surveillance and notions of motherhood and mothering in contexts of forced migration. It argues that perceptions of reproductive potential shape how displaced women can and do migrate.
Paper long abstract:
Pregnant refugee and asylum-seeking women are subject to maternal care and immigration controls, two divergent forms of surveillance and management. Research on forced migrants frequently emphasises the violent exclusion of refugees by the state, yet reproduction presents a potential zone of inclusion, where women and their infants are rendered deserving of protection on the basis of motherhood, rather than persecution. This paper draws on ethnographic research with displaced women in Kenya and the UK to examine the ways in which women's claims to asylum and the exceptional zones of inclusion are grounded in a reproductive politics that values and defines women by their reproductive potential. Pregnancy and motherhood may be a source of vulnerability, but can this vulnerability be mobilized in ways that enable women to navigate hostile and obscure border regimes? Rather than assuming pregnancy is an exclusively positive or negative experience, this paper illuminates women's complex and highly stratified experiences of reproduction. In doing so it explores how practices of surveillance and care rely on the selective deployment of often conflicting ideas of motherhood as identity and mothering as practice, and how the perceived potential for reproduction shapes women's opportunities for migration.
Paper short abstract:
Taking an intersectional feminist view and drawing on the experiences and biographical narratives of three women from Eritrea, who after having lived with precarious status in Israel found their way to the UK, I explore women's reproductive and mothering practices against global migration regimes.
Paper long abstract:
Women from Eritrea, seeking asylum, negotiate multiple, often interlocking, racist and patriarchal structures of power and oppression, influencing, disrupting and restricting their autonomy, reproductive freedoms and mothering practices. As part of long-term, multi-sited ethnographic research in both Israel and the UK, this paper zooms in on the biographical narratives and lived experiences of three women from Eritrea, who after having lived with precarious status in Israel, creatively migrated to the UK. Taking an academic-activist intersectional feminist approach, I explore their reproductive and mothering practices 'against' global migration regimes. The women go through extensive length to secure safety for their (unborn) children and themselves. I follow the women from their everyday struggles for survival in Israel, where they live with precarious status, in poor housing and with limited access to health and welfare access, legal precariousness toward employment; and a segregated education system for their children. I look at their onwards search for opportunities and alternatives for themselves and their children in the UK, finding themselves in a different hostile environment. The paper sets out how structural violence and intersectional oppression inherent in both asylum regimes and bordering policies and practices influence decision making around secondary migration, family separation and mothering across borders. By focussing on creative migration, fighting male and state violence, taking on alternative identities, pregnancy and birth in detention, and prolonged separation from children, I discuss ways in which these women experience and resist restrictive migration regimes, patriarchal policies, and institutional racism in Israel and in the UK.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation discusses how Central American women become "good" mothers while navigating maternal health policy and migration status in the USA; while speaking to themes of forced migration, maternal decision-making practices, and the precarity of life for migrants with liminal legal statuses.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, I will discuss the ways in which Central American women become "good" mothers while they navigate their role as migrants in the United States of America. As defined by Biehl and Locke (2010; 2017:4), "becoming" acknowledges the ability of people to transform themselves and their lives through small, mundane acts of resistance to multiple systems of oppression. For this analysis, I use the anthropology of becoming as a lens to view the daily, incremental actions of individual control that Central American migrant women take as they move within the larger political economy of the state in order to access maternal healthcare and become "good" mothers. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles, I discuss the ways in which California uses maternal healthcare policy to frame levels of belonging for undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. Further, I analyze the production and circulation of maternal healthcare information, with a focus on how Central American migrant women access, utilize and readapt this information to better fit their lives. Lastly, I explore the ways in which migrant women perform cultural citizenship and acts of resistance as they concurrently navigate the asylum and maternal health systems. Through the ways in which migrant women reframe their conceptions of "good" maternal care and motherhood to fit their precarious lives in the USA, broader themes of forced female migration, maternal decision-making practices, and the precarity of life for migrants with liminal legal statuses can be further examined.
Paper short abstract:
Analysing the situation of single mothers who came with their children to Germany to seek asylum, I suggest that the struggle of holding a precarious legal status has several direct and indirect effects on how motherhood is practiced and experienced
Paper long abstract:
I analyse the plights of two single mothers who fled to Berlin with their children during the so-called European 'refugee crisis' to seek asylum. Since both women come from 'safe' countries of origin, their chances to stay in Germany with a stable, long-term legal status are minimal. Hence, they live from one short-term legal status to the next with deportation and illegality always looming on the horizon. The analysis I present in this paper is informed by long-term ethnographic fieldwork with numerous mothers who came (mainly from the Middle East) to Germany in the past years to seek asylum.
Holding an insecure legal status translates into restrictions and different forms of exclusion in the everyday life in Germany and thus shapes the ways in which these women can enact relationships with their children. I trace the strategies they employ to deal with these restrictions, analyse how they create a daily routine for their children in times of utmost uncertainty, and look at their aspirations for the future.
Struggling with legal precarity without an end in sight, the relationships both women experience with their children have different meanings: they are small zones of "familiarity, comfort, meaning, and safety" (Willen 2014: 86); they are the reasons why they keep on going, strategise, and invest immense energy in their fights for legal stability. At the same time, however, both women had to realise that under the conditions they faced, their abilities to be the 'good' mothers they wished to be were severely restrained.