Paper short abstract:

This research examines how the Japanese context affects the experiences of immigrant Muslim women and how they navigate new body norms. This paper demonstrates that Muslim women are able to navigate through different body norms to gain convenience in different contexts.

Paper long abstract:

This research focuses on the experiences of immigrant Muslim women in Japan, exploring the ways in which the Japanese context shapes the nature of public attention on minorities' bodies and how visible minorities negotiate new body norms at the individual level. In Japan, where a monoethnic ideology is officially and unofficially promoted, migrants, including Muslim women, are often downplayed or ignored and racialized as "non-Japanese." However, unlike the situation in Europe, their religious identity as Muslims has often taken a back seat to their foreign identity due to the salient Japanese/foreigner binary and the marginalized status of Muslims in Japan.

The study finds that although Muslim women appreciate the “less Islamophobic” environment in Japan and actively absorb body norms (e.g., greeting, manner, dress code) from Japanese society that align with Islamic values, their visible foreign identity and the Japanese perception of visible non-Japanese as equivalent to temporary foreign residents prevent them from "taken seriously,” leading to feelings of exclusion and isolation.

The nature of these experiences resulted in Muslim women expressing frustration that their embodied change and attempts to integrate did not appear to be accepted by the receiving society. Nonetheless, Muslim women are able to move between different body norms in different contexts to gain convenience: By occasionally playing the "foreigner” or “Muslim card," for example, they were exempt from some of the social norms imposed on local Japanese people.

Paper short abstract:

How do Chinese migrant women construct the 'ideal' body? By crossing hegemonic and 'Eurocentric' ideals of success and beauty that circulate globally, with imaginaries of modernity and desires for integration, I seek to understand what is the influence of the experience of mobility.

Paper long abstract:

In my PhD project I propose to conduct an ethnographic study on the construction of the 'ideal' body of Chinese migrant women in Lisbon (Portugal) and the surgical and aesthetic practices they operate to achieve it.

Crossing hegemonic and 'Eurocentric' ideals of success and beauty that circulate globally, with imaginaries of modernity and desires for integration, I seek to understand what is the influence of my ethnographic experience of transnational mobility to a European country. Using qualitative methodologies (interviews, participant observation and life story reconstruction), I analyse the self-construction projects and somatic biographies of Chinese women in Lisbon.

By identifying the main practices performed and their symbolic values, my aim with this project is to understand the aesthetic imaginary of Chinese migrant women and in which aspects these references reveal the influence of the host society, origin and global narratives and to demonstrate how this self-construction not only reifies hierarchical social structures but also reflects and reproduces social variables of gender, class and race.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how bodies and subjectivities are managed and (re)constructed by individuals as part of the migration processes. At the beginning of the migratory project, but also in the arrival societies, individual are conscious of the requirement of develop strategies to achieve their goals.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how bodies and subjectivities are managed and (re)constructed by individuals as part of the migration processes.

Our proposal is based on two premises. On the one hand, the consideration of migration as a constant transformative process and lived experience. And, on the other hand, the body as an analyzer of identities and social dynamics. Having this premises in consideration, this paper will explore different strategies that migrant people develop to achieve success in their migratory processes. Strategies that are developed not only during the mobilities that migration implies but also in the societies of arrival since people are conscious of the specific requirement that are necessaries to achieve their goals. From a feminist analysis, we will show different strategies and resources developed by individuals depending on the context, on the borders, but especially on gender.

The results presented in this paper are part of a multi-sited ethnographic research as well as an in-depth literature review.

Paper short abstract:

How Ukrainian refugee women describe problems they had to overcome since beginning of active war phase. These are following challenges: to believe in beginning of a full-scale war, to safe children, to adapt in a foreign country. Conflicts on new place, personal achievements are little talked about.

Paper long abstract:

The active phase of the Russian-Ukrainian war caused extraordinary challenges for the Ukrainian people. Millions of women were forced to go abroad to save their children. People had to make decisions at a time of maximum uncertainty and threat. The purpose is to analyze how women describe the time they spent at a new place of residence. Source base of the report is interview recorded in Poland, France and Finland during the year, from April 2022 to April 2023. The obstacles mentioned by the women can be divided into three chronological groups: packing for the way, evacuation time, adaptation in a new place. In the first group, women talk a lot and in detail about preparing things for evacuation, about the impossibility of calling a taxi to get to the station for the evacuation trains, about how difficult it was to get on the evacuation train. Less attention is paid to the road itself, but it is mentioned without fail, with remarks that it was the hardest thing that had to be experienced. Until now, women gratefully remember random people, volunteers who helped at that stage. In stories about adaptation in a new place, the most difficult thing for many is the need to make decisions, care for children alone, without a husband. Women suffer from the devaluation of their career achievements, as their skills cannot be properly valued in a foreign country. People who lost their homes due to bombing are looking for ways to survive this loss.

Paper short abstract:

The paper addresses Afro-Cuban diasporic dance as a form of embodied knowledge that challenges Eurocentric educational models through pedagogies rooted in the broader project at the core of the Cuban Revolution.

Paper long abstract:

The paper addresses Afro-Cuban diasporic dance as a form of embodied knowledge that challenges Eurocentric educational models through pedagogies rooted in the broader project at the core of the Cuban Revolution.

Cuban dancers find careers abroad to be a viable alternative to an otherwise difficult to access European labor market. Their experiences and professional trajectories in migratory contexts are overdetermined and overladen with racist meanings, which condition their ways of being in the world. Cuba – as imaginative construction – holds a central place on the global dance marketplace, which values or devalues dancers for their race and ethnicity. Inscribed as commodities in an ‘economy of diversity’ (Tomé 2019), dancing selves are consolidated in a race for economic and symbolic capital governed by market logic. As embodied knowledge becomes commodified, disrupted transmission processes are revived and integrated into new socio-cultural contexts, shifting positions of knowledge control. The transformative capacities of the dancing body as a living archive open pathways to memories of the past and at the same time new possibilities for future performances.

Choreographic inheritance embodied and disseminated through Afro-Cuban dance addresses the underlying epistemological tension of Black dance (and Black bodies) being controlled, dominated, and exoticized, and reclaims agency for Cubans within a music and dance style that has been repackaged and reinterpreted around the world.