Paper short abstract:

Based on research into the aesthetic transformations of Chinese women in Lisbon, I question how these 'yummy mummies’ construct their body projects, navigating between traditions, aesthetic imperatives that dictate the success of the maternity project, ideas of modernity and family pressures.

Paper long abstract:

The pressure of beauty for women in contemporary societies is already well documented, but with the extraordinary proliferation of representations of motherhood and celebrity motherhood, mothers are now in the crosshairs of this growing cult of beauty. The expansion of ‘aesthetic entrepreneurship’ (Elias et al. 2017) during pregnancy, the imperative to recover the body and the ideal of the "yummi mummy" have become the new norms in many Western and non-Western societies. This body ideal involves the period leading up to childbirth, but goes beyond controlling weight gain. Maintaining a desirable body is muldimensional and encompasses many stages, like diet during pregnancy, type of delivery, breastfeeding, physical activity and beauty procedures.

From a transnational feminist perspective, this presentation steams from research into the aesthetic transformations of Chinese women in Lisbon. Crossing the arenas of migration, transnationalism and critical beauty studies, I question how Chinese migrants 'yummy mummies’ construct their body projects, navigating between traditions (such as the practice of zuo yue zi), aesthetic imperatives that dictate the success of the maternity project, ideas of modernity and family pressures (close and distant).

Contrary to the rigid agency/structure dichotomy, ethnography is valuable for understanding these multivalent and sometimes contradictory articulations that exist between individuals, the local culture of appearance and global neoliberal ideology (as Keyser-Verreault 2022 properly suggests). My analysis covers this phenomenon at the intersection of individualism, class manifestations, patriarchal and gender appearance norms – and, above all, questioning the “ultimate modern woman” (Litter 2013) as a code of femininity.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation focuses on the experiences of motherhood of Mexican women engaged in seasonal agricultural labour in Canada. Underpinned by post-colonial feminism, the study explores the impact of the annual cycle of separation and reunification on mother-child relationships and mental health.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation focuses on the experiences of motherhood of Mexican women engaged in seasonal agricultural labour in Canada for over 10 years. Underpinned by post-colonial feminism, the study explores the impact of engaging in an annual cycle of separation and reunification on mother-child relationships and their mental health.

The temporal pattern of migratory journeys has received limited attention as an element shaping the relationships of migrant workers and their families. In contrast to the uncertainty regarding the time-frame for reunification that undocumented migrants and refugees commonly face, workers participating in the so-called temporary foreign worker programs are bound to a nonnegotiable schedule of arrival and return home. After a few months working abroad, workers must return home for a period of time before departing again, if re-hired.

In this context, seasonal labour migration results in long periods of 'apartness' (8 months) followed by periods of 'togetherness' in Mexico (4 months) for mother-child dyads. Findings from this critical ethnography underscore the central role that temporal patterns of migration play in the experiences of migrant mothers and their non-migrating kin, as mediated by labour precarity, belonging struggles, traditional gender norms, and racial discrimination.

Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with the temporalities of migration from the perspective of the everyday ways in which mothers in the British asylum system carve out strategies to continue living and making life, navigating the ordinary rhythms of caring and the coercive temporalities of state-corporate neglect.

Paper long abstract:

Time organizes people’s experiences of navigating the British asylum process, but it also folds, as a deeply coercive force, into the intimate textures of everyday life and life-making. Drawing on fourteen months of fieldwork conducted with mothers living in asylum accommodation in London, this paper sheds light on how time is built into everyday experiences of mothering and caring, opening ways to rethink the place of time within the governing assemblages of the asylum regime and the state-corporate's power in impacting people's ability to make and sustain life. How might we engage with the temporalities of migration from the perspective of the everyday ways in which mothers carve out strategies to continue living and making life? This paper builds on a temporal gaze into tensions that seam together the rhythms of domestic intimacy and the temporal orderings of daily life in asylum accommodation to argue how mothers attempt to stitch together, through the labours of caring, the violent disjunctures that take place between the state-corporate practices of deprivation and neglect and their own projects of building homes and families. Challenging narratives that assume ‘dispossession’ or ‘stand by’ as fixed signifiers of how time is imposed on and lived by migrants, this paper points instead to the time of those mothering in asylum accommodation as a more complex, ongoing, co-constituted project of life-making, concluding that the temporalities and rhythms of seeking asylum are always negotiated and resisted, as mothers find new modes of sustaining life through other rhythms.

Paper short abstract:

Based on two-years ethnographic research with women aged between 45 and 60 who have moved from various parts of Morocco to Northern Italy between their 25s and 40s, this contribution aims to deepen the “time reasoning” their mothering experience required in relation to their "having to move".

Paper long abstract:

In the 2020s, more than 400,000 people living in Italy hold Moroccan citizenship, making it the largest non-EU citizenship by number of residents in the country; over 60% settled in the northern regions. A solid mobility route between Morocco and Italy traces back to the 80s and improved rapidly thanks to different channels. Although initially configured as a predominantly male mobility, over time authors as Vanessa Maher and Ruba Salih have emphasised the central role qualitatively played by women; but, mainly through family reunification permits (or other siblings/friends related tactics), also a quantitative gender-balance have been achieved in the recent demographic surveys concerning this targeted population. As Alice Elliot and Francesco Vacchiano have similarly noted in two texts published in 2021, a heartfelt overlap between concepts of “migration” and “life itself” (or a “dignified life”) deeply embedded a large part of the contemporary Moroccan society. And when you both have to move and mothering, underlined an interlocutor of mine, then “it’s all about timing”.

Based on two-years ethnographic research with women of different generations and socio-economic background who have moved from various parts of Morocco to Northern Italy, this contribution aims to focus on the experiences of those aged between 45 and 60 who emigrated between their 25s and 40s. For many of them, pregnancies shaped their migration possibilities, timing and modalities, but how to subsequently manage “all the time” required of a mother “far from home” demanded a series of creative behaviours and inedited reasonings.

Paper short abstract:

To grasp the specific temporalities of migrant mothers’ experiences in council estate neighbourhoods, I coin an ethnographic concept: arrival. It conflates their past trajectories through welfare services with how everyday experiences of being a mother are shaped by reputation in the public space.

Paper long abstract:

My proposal focuses on migrant mothers’ experiences examined from the public space within the neighbourhood. Drawing on a long-term ethnography in a Parisian council estate, I have observed how mothers evolve in their everyday lives with a view of elaborating strategies to mobilize parenting resources. Their interactions with social services revolve around moralities crossing two dimensions of reproductive labour: respectability --defined by Marylin Strathern as the external face of internal morality-- and community engagement, which entails that mothers “come out of their home”, leading to a continuum of involvements ranging from plain neighbourhood sociabilities up to more committed volunteering. Allowing comprehension of how and why some embody the mothering figures valued, the ethnography has unveiled the overlapping of the “arrival” in the neighbourhood (access to the council estate) and migrant mothers’ self-presentations around how they speak of themselves and their pasts. On one side, married women have arrived in France through family reunification and swiftly obtained social rights; on the other side, lone mothers have arrived illegally and experienced precarity and homelessness before having access to “private life” through the council estate. The concept « shapes of the arrival" enables me to grasp the structural temporalities of women migration and the ethnographic temporalities of mothers’ everyday experiences, including both parenting and affective citizenship, within the public space.

Paper short abstract:

This article focuses on the experience of 'second generation' mothers of African origin in Italy and shows how their struggles for the future of children and their educational choices are part of a personal way of 'navigating' citizenship and counteracting racial hierarchies.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to explore the intersection and the overlap of mothering practices and acts of affective citizenship, focusing on the maternal trajectories of Italian women of African descent. By approaching motherhood as biosocial threshold, on which both subjective and collective tensions and negotiations reverberate, this contribution aims to analyse how feelings of belonging, claims and practices of citizenship may evolve and/or emerge while being and/or becoming a black mother in Italy. Drawing on a research conducted with second-generation mothers whose families came from West African countries, this paper will highlight the connection between mother’s hopes, struggles and emotions related to children’s future and their navigation of citizenship in a national context permeated by racially based social boundaries. Inspired by feminist literature on black mothering, the contribution pushes for more attention to diversities and specificities of mothering practices and of affective citizenship acts resulting by racial and class variations. On the one hand, mothers protect children from discrimination in everyday life by counteracting institutional differentiation practices; on the other hand, they adopt specific educational styles to make children aware of the social and emotional implications of skin colour and cultural background in their social experiences. Therefore, by cultivating children's self-esteem and self-awareness as Italian citizens, mothers aim to teach them how to be resilient to the hegemonic idea of a colour-blind nation, while supporting their social inclusion and expanding their space of citizenship.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how mothers are living with and navigating the asylum procedure, in order to shine light on the affective, embodied process of accessing legal status. It shows the interplay between the spatial-temporal and socio-legal im/mobilities of the procedure and of life course and family.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how mothers are living with and navigating the asylum procedure – within 'camps' and beyond – in order to shine light on the affective, embodied process of seeking access to legal status in Belgium. It focuses on the (inter)subjective temporal dimension of “trajectories”, understood as sequences of spatial-temporal and socio-legal im/mobilities that become entangled with temporalities of life course and social change. Based on follow-along ethnography, I demonstrate how obtaining asylum means navigating a multipronged labyrinth: moving from one reception centre to another, passing through institutional ’milestones’ of the procedure, with (semi)legal documents to obtain, and deadlines to comply with. I argue that, on the one hand, mothers adhere to the policy “ideal” of a step-wise, linear procedure to find stability and order. On the other hand, the asylum trajectory is understood as inconsistent, arbitrary and complex: it is lived through chronic waiting and accelerated movements, disrupting the temporalities of life course and family, most particularly in relation to pregnancies, schooling and housing. Drawing on the concepts of “temporal borders” and “stealing back time” (Khosravi, 2018), I demonstrate how mothers negotiate access to other temporalities (beyond waithood) to create liveable (private) spaces for their families

Paper short abstract:

This paper is based on an analysis of thirty-two semi-structured in-depth interviews with mothers who fled Ukraine with their children and currently live in Germany (in Berlin and Frankfurt/Oder). Drawing on the interviewees’ accounts, the paper traces a refugee- and motherhood nexus over time.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on an analysis of original data collected between August and November 2022, and then again between September and December 2024, consisting of thirty-two semi-structured in-depth interviews with mothers who fled Ukraine with their children and currently live in Germany (in Berlin and Frankfurt/Oder).

Drawing on the interviewees’ accounts, the paper traces a refugee- and motherhood nexus over time, allowing us to understand how the status as a refugee and mother may influence on life-building processes in a new environment.

During the first round of interviews, the interlocutors' motherhood serves as a source of both mobility and immobility. They left Ukraine to protect their children, but in Germany are reduced to being ‘just mothers’, despite in most cases being highly skilled and accomplished career-women. One year later, in the follow-up interviews, they demonstrate stronger resilience patterns through motherhood, not only by being protectors of their children, but also by building new lives.

Paper long abstract:

The Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative is a life-course trial that tests whether interventions in the early life period from preconception to early childhood might impact on both maternal and child wellbeing. Working with HeLTI South Africa, the nested Trajectories study aims to build effective and socially responsive life course interventions. In this paper we present qualitative longitudinal research conducted in two waves of field work with 60 and 45 women, enrolled in the HeLTI Trial in Soweto, South Africa. If becoming a mother generate expectations and have become complex and paradoxical, motherhood though, is a social construction, therefore, we explore social representations and perceptions of motherhood, giving voice to women’s narratives on how becoming a mother influenced one's sense of self, personal aspirations, and life goals. In contrast to the scientific notion of ‘intergenerational transmissions’ that shapes maternal and child health policies focused on preconception and maternal behaviors. We are concerned with how young women understand intergenerational relations. We provide a nuanced picture of what constitutes family, kin and care in this specific context. These insights are crucial if scientific research and policy is to be contextually responsive.

Paper short abstract:

This contribution discusses how prolonged waiting is a necropolitical tool that increases the vulnerabilities of migrant women transiting Mexico. It discusses how becoming a mother en route expands the structural violence against migrant women, forcing them to return to their origin countries.

Paper long abstract:

Through an ethnographic study (2014-2016) at the Mexican-Guatemalan Border and the methodology of the extended case method (in Mexico, the U.S., and Honduras), I explore the biographies of five Honduran women who, having become mothers en route, faced systemic and structural violence that forced them to return to their country.

In this contribution I argue that Honduran migrant women escaping violence from their country face even more violent social, political and cultural structures in Mexico when becoming pregnant en route. Motherhood then becomes a burden that force migrant women to return to their countries in search for support networks to face their new status. Nevertheless, in Honduras they face moral and social judgment and discrimination, even worse as when they abandoned their country in search for a better life. This study shows how structural violence is encountered in the origin, transit, and destination countries due to reproductive decisions.