Paper short abstract:

Based on ongoing research in Chile, I ask how to grasp work and healthcare, two fundamental aspects of migration usually treated separately. They offer a methodological challenge in the understanding of their articulation in migrants’ lives being both related to specific and distinct spaces.

Paper long abstract:

This paper opens methodological questions derived from an interest in how migrant work and healthcare articulate analytically while being de facto methodologically graspable in different spaces. While work scholarship often confines healthcare to occupational health, healthcare research usually includes "employment" as a determinant of service access. Instead, I look at how work and health mutually articulate beyond occupational health and employment as an access factor. The paper is based on a current research project in Temuco (Chile), that hosts a new wave of migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean mainly employed in the service sector and cared for by the public healthcare system. In this context, paid work conditions determine where and under what circumstances migrants live. Affordability and residence, in turn, determine inclusion in public care within the segregated public-private Chilean healthcare system. Thus, there is a tension between the mobile placement of production under high turnover and precarious conditions, and highly place-specific welfare provision such as healthcare. It is necessary to explore migrant labour as both mobile and placed in the city and the work of institutions providing care in a localized manner. This is approached by on the one hand seeking the views of institutional actors and on the other through an ethnographic case study of migrant work. However, the methodological conundrum explored in this paper remains: how to study the intersection between the world of health, institutionally space-bound and distributed in the city, and a dispersed and mobile migrant labour?