Paper short abstract:

Illustrating the maternity experiences of Ethiopian and Tanzanian domestic workers, this article explores how women imagine, represent and plan for the future in different ways during several phases of their lives.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution reflects on the reproductive experiences of Tanzanian and Ethiopian women who, since their childhood, move to different (rural and urban) areas in both countries to work as domestic workers in their employers' households. Through the analysis of their narratives and life trajectories, I show how women perceive, conceive and represent crucial moments of transition to adulthood, imagine and plan future projects. In particular, I describe the motherhood experiences of some domestic workers I met, the resulting changes in their working and relational lives, and the different motherhood strategies that women mobilise. Throughout different phases of their lives, women change the way they imagine their future, rethink and creatively reshape life plans and strategies to achieve certain goals. Some women did not have children when I first met them in Ethiopia and Tanzania. But the situation had radically changed when I returned back to the field during a second research period. The women who had become pregnant in the meantime, or had become mothers, had changed their strategies and life plans. But also the way they described their past and present experiences, as well as the way they imagined their future and that of others. In this paper, imagining and planning for the future are therefore analysed by considering their temporalities and illustrating, in comparative terms, the motherhood practices in the everyday lives of Ethiopian and Tanzanian domestic workers.

Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates the life choices and reproductive outcomes of female freedom fighters in Eritrea and Eritrean domestic workers in Italy. Indeed, despite their different life trajectories and common dedication to the nationalist cause, they had similar ‘adverse reproductive outcomes’.

Paper long abstract:

Between the 1960s and 1980s, Eritrean female migrants’ and freedom fighters’ choices of mobility and mobilisation affected their reproductive career. Despite their different life trajectories and common dedication to the nationalist cause, they had similar ‘adverse reproductive outcomes’. Indeed, they had no children and once elders they had to face the emotional, social, and economic consequences of their ‘empty wombs’.

On the one hand, this has led to rework the social meaning of motherhood. On the other hand, these elder women must confront the weakening of traditional solidarity networks and the lack of support by the youth. In Italy, informal labour relations which had guaranteed room and board to Eritrean domestic workers as well as the opportunity to economically support their families and the liberation fronts, have not translated into adequate retirement benefits nor social relations to cope with the challenges of ageing.

This paper, revolving around life stories and reproductive careers of freedom fighters in Eritrea and Eritrean domestic workers in Italy, consider the historical, social, and political meaning of ‘empty wombs’ of women belonging different birth cohorts. It aims at shedding light on how gender roles within Eritrea and in diasporic networks have changed in relation to life choices and reproductive outcomes. The paper emphasises the methodological issues underlying this ongoing research; how the voluntary choice of mothering the nation did not necessarily mirrored reproductive desires; the experiences in origin and hosting countries vis à vis gender roles, working positions and ageing.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore some of the ways in which individuals from the South African diaspora who give birth in the UK, navigate and (re)imagine their and their children’s identities as migrants/citizens within problematic and complex UK bureaucratic and health systems through matrescence.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on doctoral research that examines the pregnancy, birth, and postnatal experiences of members of the South African diaspora who give birth in the UK, this paper will explore some of the ways in which individuals navigate and (re)imagine their and their children’s identities as migrants/citizens within problematic and complex UK bureaucratic and health systems through matrescence (Raphael 1975). Triangulating data gathered by way of autoethnography, interviews, and participant observation, it investigates how the articulation of mother/migrant experiences manifest in daily life, and aims to unpack how women respond to these experiences according to their own cultural understandings of being South Africans living in the UK, and how those understandings in turn affect their overall maternal experience/s.

Examining women’s experiences beyond simply ‘being mothers’ (as an identity) and by seeing mothering or ‘motherwork’ (Collins 1994) as an intentional social practice involving both emotion and rationality (Ruddick 1980), we can examine how the maternal migrant is socially and historically constructed. Exploring how South African migrant mothers attempt to balance these transnational positionalities for themselves and their children, through visa applications, marriages, migrancy and citizenship, will constitute a valuable contribution to the existing literature on migrancy, maternal identity, and transnational parenthood more broadly.

Paper short abstract:

I argue that herbal practices as a form of cultural heritage influenced the female reproductive health system. Through narratives from the shrine, I reveal hitherto unexplored significance, and offer new vistas for future scholarship, in the African contribution to global reproductive health.

Paper long abstract:

Historiography on colonial medical history often negates the significance of herbal medicine in sustaining the health of people. By placing emphasis on the activities of British medical officers and missionary medicine, existing research on the colonial medical system largely sidelines the roles that healers played in engendering global maternal health. Most interpretations of global health largely dismissed Yoruba medicine and little is known about the roles of African traditional healers and healing institutions in social reproduction. Taking the case of Yorubaland, I contend that pre-literate Africa had a sustained system of non-biomedical practices before the onset of colonialism and Christianity. By contrast, I argue that herbal knowledge and practices as a form of cultural heritage influenced the female reproductive health system. Through oral shreds of evidence, ethnographic accounts, interactions with healers, and analysis of existing literature, this paper explores the changing dynamics of herbal healing and fertility in Yoruba culture. I argue that healers in their capacity, provide preventive and holistic treatment to meet the physical, psychological, spiritual, and reproductive needs of women. A focus on herbal medicine uncovers the dynamic indigenous knowledge and practices which took place in shrines between healers and prospective mothers in the British colony of Yorubaland. I reveal hitherto unexplored significance, and offer new vistas for future scholarship, in the African contribution to global reproductive health.

Paper short abstract:

Motherhood strategies in the Sierra Leonean diaspora are analyzed as future-oriented practices that structure children’s social standards. Middle-classing projects bind generations together, thus demonstrating how the diaspora’s future relies on mother’s emotional labour to achieve class stability.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I analyze how reproductive practices related to upbringing, education and socialization become middle-classing projects that bind several generations together. Looking at middle-classing strategies among Sierra Leonean women living in Europe, it examines the strategies by which mothers intend to create a better future for their children in the diaspora. Future-oriented motherhood practices are twofold. Firstly, they involve ‘intense mothering’ – namely, mothering that is considered more active, concerned and dedicated than would be the case in Sierra Leone. This implies, for instance, that women find strategies to care for the children themselves even when they work, or to protect them from racism and ‘bad company’. As a result, for women, having children in the diaspora becomes both an immense responsibility and a burden that they tend to carry alone. Secondly, caring for the future implies achieving class stability in Europe over generations. In this regard, for Sierra Leonean women, binding the new generation around collective values appears critical. Mothers create and maintain fictive kinship within their diasporic networks, which allows children to see themselves as part of extended families and as part of a ‘cohort’ sharing similar social expectations. This transmission and ‘class effect’ are particularly visible, as children get organized and meet in associations of their own. Many also have projects designed at giving 'a better image’ of Sierra Leone abroad. Future-oriented strategies demonstrate how the diaspora’s future relies on mother’s emotional labour, as they carefully plan, sustain and encourage their children to cultivate middle-class standards.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the experiences of a group of activist mothers with a migratory background living in Sweden. It explores how collective practices reshape their role as mothers, women and migrants, and allow them to imagine and form better futures for their local and diasporic networks.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses mothering practices of women from the Horn of Africa living in the multiethnic low-income neighbourhood of Rinkeby, Stockholm. While Rinkeby feels like a welcoming and safe home to many of its inhabitants, it has become synonymous with youth crime, violence and rioting in the wider Swedish public space. Every weekend, at night, the so-called “Mothers of Rinkeby” patrols the streets of the neighbourhood to dissuade those acts of violence that have marked the recent history of the neighbourhood. Based on an ethnography carried out in 2018, this paper argues that this social practice reshapes the activists’ roles as mothers, women and migrants by acting on their private and public, and individual and collective selves. On the one hand, patrolling helps women to acquire a new public agency with respect to gender-related roles attributed to them both within their diasporic networks and in the Swedish context (the stereotypical imaginary of Black and Muslim women as passive which often limits their spaces of action to the intimate sphere of family life). On the other hand, patrolling allows them to challenge the negative representations of Rinkeby and become key actors in these attempts to reduce the stigma attributed to the neighbourhood and its inhabitants. By mothering not only their own children but their wider youth community, the “Mothers of Rinkeby” seek to imagine and shape alternative and better futures for their neighbourhood and for their respective diasporic groups.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Russia (2017-2019) and on virtual research into the present, to ask how Congolese migrant women forge futures for their children, even as states and aid organizations circumscribe the forms of intimacy, kinship, and reproduction women can enact.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines Congolese women’s efforts to navigate a detention regime on the edge of Europe and asks how women are forging futures for their children, even as states and aid organizations circumscribe the forms of intimacy, kinship, and reproduction they can enact. As of the late 1990s refugee women and men from various sub-Saharan countries--including Congo, a site of ongoing strife with a history of connection to the Soviet Union and recently renewed Russian military funding—began seeking asylum in Russia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Moscow (2017-2019) among women asylum seekers, my research is framed within a vibrant literature on how the policing of mobility transforms migrants’ experience of kinship and care (e.g., Coe 2013; Constable 2014). I present portraits of several women and their efforts to sustain kinship ties and care for children-- one of them sustaining strong ties to Congo (DRC), and others avoiding such ties, and instead focused on safeguarding care for their children born in Russia. In some cases migrant interlocutors describe young children as key to easing life’s travails, and even mobility across Moscow; especially small children, usually born in Russia and possessing a Russian birth certificate (but not citizenship), can provide a certain protection from police harassment, costly fines, or even deportation. Overall, I argue that in portraying how migrant mothers make decisions about reproduction and imagine a future for children, in Russia or elsewhere, their lives are deeply entangled in the politics of the state where they seek refuge.

Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnography of the migrant reception system and welfare in Italy, I will investigate affection and the intimate dimension of motherhood by observing African diaspora reproductive stereotypes but also mothers’ capacity to aspire, and invisible social ties among autochthonous and migrants.

Paper long abstract:

Inspired by the notion of affective circuits (Cole, Groes 2016), I explore how this notion might be applied to children born in migration (0-5 years) and West African mothers – asylum or international protection seekers – who crossed the Mediterranean and arrived in Bologna (Italy). In this paper, based on ethnography carried out in Bologna since 2018, I analyze maternity experiences, ideas of relatedness and opportunities offered by the local context, welfare and the migrant reception system in the contingent time of the new Decree Laws on migration and Covid-19 rules and related surveillance effects. By looking at reception practices as historical and social artifacts, I investigate affection and the intimate dimension of motherhood as a space to observe African diaspora reproductive stereotypes but also mothers’ capacity to aspire, ideas of freedom, and new and invisible social relations among autochthonous residents and migrants.

Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork research and conversations with women positioned differently in Italy’s broad Moroccan diaspora, the paper will address some of their expectations, desires and experiences of mobility and reproductive practices.

Paper long abstract:

The emergence of a fairly solid and enduring migration route between Morocco and Italy dates back to the 1980s. The trajectories, means and outcomes of these mobilities have varied greatly, but a number of specific areas of Italy are today inhabited by a well-established population that can be considered to be part of a so-called “Moroccan diaspora”. The number of official residents holding Moroccan citizenship exceeded 400,000 in 2022, yet these figures do not consider either the many people who now hold (dually or exclusively) Italian citizenship, nor those who aren’t registered. As it is often the case, these migrations have been described as mainly undertaken by men; who are later joined by their wives, children and relatives. Even though a male-driven route has often been a preferable technique of socio-geographical mobility within the Moroccan diaspora, equally relevant are both female-driven migration trajectories (where women are the ‘first’ to reach Italy), as well as 'the followers' strong commitment in planning for their own mobility. Engaging with the remarkable previous works of several scholars (to name but a few, Maher, Salih, Capelli, Menin, Gribaldo), this paper proposes to continue an exploration of the difficulties, desires, accommodations, and achievements with regard to mobility and intimacy choices for women differently belonging to Italy’s Moroccan diaspora.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the experiences of Ghanaian mothers, of different ages and generations, living in Italy, aiming at observing how mobility trajectories, reproductive experiences and aspirations towards the future are intertwined, represented, and reinterpreted in biographical narratives.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution focuses on the experiences of Ghanaian mothers, of different ages and generations, living in Italy, and aims at exploring how mobility trajectories, reproductive experiences and aspirations towards future are intertwined, represented, and reinterpreted in their biographical narratives. Considering motherhood as a process of becoming, in which moral and social expectations are continuously negotiated (Lowe 2019), this paper adopts a generational perspective and, therefore, observes how the meanings of giving life changes across generations, also in relation to mobility processes. In the ongoing research with women of Ghanian origin in Italy, indeed, “being a mother” clearly emerges as an important criterion for evaluating the success of a woman in migration and life trajectories, as well as a crucial step toward adulthood and autonomy within the scattered kinship networks. This is particularly evident among elderly Ghanaian women, many of whom became mothers in contexts of high socio-economic precariousness, without giving up their personal work projects. The maternal experiences of their daughters reveal a changed relations - albeit not less problematic or critical - both with the racialized imaginaries spread locally, both with gender norms and moral duties transmitted in kinship and diasporic networks. By exploring how notions of sameness and difference, repetition and change, distance and proximity are evoked and treated in their narratives, we will observe the processes of generating and negotiating identities, implicit in mothering practices, and how these express new individual and collective desires for the future.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I will explore racial disparities related to maternal health and rights in Europe and the US. I will show how, although the different healthcare systems, African migrant and Afro-descendant women experience health inequalities and differential treatments in both contexts.

Paper long abstract:

Moving from reproductive justice/ reproductive injustice literature (Ross, Solinger, 2017; Davis, 2019; Zakiya, 2020), I will explore racial disparities related to maternal health and rights in Europe and the United States. Starting from the findings of a comparative research study I have carried out among African migrant and Afro-descendant women I will highlight the cross-national dimension of health inequalities and differential treatments black women experience in both contexts.

In this framework, I will show how, although these populations ask for medical support in two different – and even opposed – healthcare systems, it is possible to found similar logics and dynamics in doctor-patient interactions. In particular, I will highlight how, together with socio-economic inequities, legal uncertainties and other systemic factors, racialized imaginaries health professionals share about black populations of mothers have an impact on the access to health services; the possibility to choose how to give birth; and the general well-being of black women and birthing people.

At the same time, I will critically reflect on the increasing role black doulas and black birth activists play in response to the poor – and differentiated – maternal care that is accessible / available to African migrant and Afro-descendant women in Europe and the United States.