Paper Short Abstract:

In this paper, I will examine (un)written narratives about the qualifications and training of Polish live-in care workers sent to Germany by transnational brokerage agencies. These narratives are constructed along intersecting gendered and ethnicised lines and reinforce social inequalities.

Paper Abstract:

Current demographic, political, and social trends, fueled by economic inequalities, have led to a significant crisis in care and social reproduction. To address gaps in care provision, the demand for transnational migrant live-in senior care is growing, allowing almost anyone to take up this work. However, this care model is highly contested due to its conflicts with human and labor rights and its exploitation of social inequalities. Moreover, in the absence of legislation regulating the qualifications of carers and monitoring mechanisms, this model poses risks not only to the carers but also to the recipients of care. In recent years, commercial brokerage agencies have emerged as self-regulating actors, driving the formalization, digitalization, and professionalization of the sector. They have introduced specific training programs for care workers, while still emphasizing the importance of soft skills and personal traits along gendered and ethnicised lines. What role does the education of transnational live-in care workers play for the workers themselves, the care recipients, and the brokerage agencies? What vulnerabilities and forms of agency arise from the intersectional positioning of care workers, particularly with regard to their age, gender, ethnicity, and educational backgrounds? Based on semi-structured interviews with caregivers and representatives of brokerage agencies, participant observation of online and in-person training courses and Facebook groups, and a content analysis of training materials, this study explores the (un)written narratives surrounding the qualifications and training of Polish live-in care workers sent to Germany by transnational brokerage agencies, using an intersectional approach.

Paper Short Abstract:

Private hosting of Ukrainian refugees in Poland operates at the intersection of care, migration, and governance. Using flash ethnographies, this paper explores how writing captures both the lived experiences and remembered narratives of hospitality, revealing the shifting borders of mobility and personal agency.

Paper Abstract:

Private hosting of Ukrainian refugees in Poland intertwines personal initiative with mobility governance. Unlike countries with official refugee sponsorship programs, Poland lacked a legal framework for private hosting when the war in Ukraine began. In response, individuals and communities spontaneously offered their homes, navigating hospitality through personal networks and evolving institutional responses. This paper examines how hosting functions as a negotiation of migration within domestic spaces, shaping experiences beyond formalized policies. How do we write about these fleeting, deeply personal moments of hosting and being hosted? How does writing shape our understanding of mobility, especially when our research encompasses both present experiences and retrospective memories of hospitality? Engaging with flash ethnographies—brief, urgent, and intense narratives—this paper explores the methodological challenges of capturing the immediacy and emotional dimensions of hosting. Inspired by Nomi Stone and Carole McGranahan, flash ethnographies document these transient yet critical experiences, illuminating intersections between personal agency, migration infrastructures, and border regimes. Drawing from ongoing ethnographic research in western Poland within the project “Private Hosting of Refugees from Ukraine in Polish Homes: Everyday Humanitarianism and Encounters across Difference”, funded by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN), I incorporate both my fieldwork and insights from my research team. This paper contributes to discussions on writing mobility and unwriting border regimes through ethnographic storytelling.

Paper Short Abstract:

Investigating migrant women’s access to midwifery care in Italy and France, focusing on barriers, obstetric racism, and mobility. Midwifery care and anamnesis create space to reimagine care. Through storytelling, women reclaim agency over reproduction, contributing to rewrite dominant narratives.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines the impact of borders on migrant women’s access to midwifery care between Italy and France in 2024. Based on interviews with migrant users of midwifery services, it explores how structural barriers, obstetric racism, and border regimes shape reproductive experiences. Challenging the Western colonial imagination, which often portrays migrant women as passive subjects, the study highlights their strategies of self-determination and how mobility regimes condition access to maternal care. The border functions as both a physical and discursive mechanism that limits care, reinforcing health disparities. Irregular migration routes increase vulnerability to illness and premature death (Gilmore, 2007). "Necropolitics" (Mbembe, 2003) frames the administrative precarity that defines reproductive experiences, while competing public discourses influence reproductive choices. The midwifery relationship of care and the appropriate use of anamnesis create a space to explore women’s experiences and construct new imaginaries of possible care. Narrative is medicine, and through storytelling, women reclaim agency over their reproductive choices. This research foregrounds migrant women’s embodied experiences, recognizing their bodies as sites of political and cultural contestation (Pesarini, 2023). By integrating storytelling with critical reflections on mobility and health regimes, the study contributes to an "unwriting" of dominant narratives on migration and reproduction. It advocates for transformative midwifery practices and equitable health policies that acknowledge migrant women’s lived realities.

Paper Short Abstract:

Based on semi-structured interviews with researchers in various national contexts, I examine the relationship between mobility, anxiety and scholarly, including ethnographic, writing.

Paper Abstract:

In this paper, I examine the relationship between mobility, anxiety and scholarly writing, including the knowledge produced by anthropologists. I explore how the contemporary mobility imperative that accompanies the neoliberalization of academic work engenders a profound sense of uncertainty and anxiety among research workers and shapes what and how is being written—and remains unwritten. Taking semi-structured interviews and unstructured conversations with international researchers in various national contexts as a departure point and interweaving my own experiences as a researcher on a fixed-term contract, I suggest that it is impossible to uncouple researchers’ writing—as well as the lack of it—from the institutional contexts, terms of employment, bureaucratic frameworks, and mobility regimes within which they work. While writing—in the form of high-impact research publications and grant proposals—is expected at an unprecedented pace and intensity in contemporary regimes of knowledge production, the same framewok engenders anxiety-ridden forms of the unwritten.

Paper Short Abstract:

Four Tunisian actors navigated visa procedures to the Netherlands, which became the plot of a performance for the Dutch audience. This paper uses the rehearsal phase as a field of inquiry to explore how theatrical creation, while navigating a visa procedure, opens new possibilities for methodology and analysis of the ‘paper border'.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines theater as a method for studying the visa procedures of Tunisians to the Schengen area. Four Tunisian actors applied for visas to the Netherlands and created a theater production that depicted the challenges and dynamics of the visa procedure itself. This performative piece not only reflects the actors’ personal encounters with the bureaucratic apparatus but also serves as a collective ethnographic engagement with the material and embodied dimensions of the ‘paper border’.

The urgency to attend to the body emerges as a critical response to the documentation regime that defines contemporary borders. Drawing on performance ethnography, this research positions the body as an active site of knowing, challenging the hegemony of textual forms of data and knowledge. Rather than relying on language alone, the actors bring their bodily experiences of and around the visa procedure into the rehearsal space. The rehearsal space becomes a space for experimentation, where movement—not text—serves as the epistemological starting point. For instance, the actors engaged in tactile interactions with paper—holding it between toes, behind ears, on their stomachs—exploring its materiality and movement through space. These embodied engagements with paper highlight the intricate ways in which bodies, documents, and borders coalesce and intersect, offering new insights into the lived experience of bureaucratic systems.

In this paper, I use the rehearsal phase as a field of inquiry to examine how moments of theatrical creation, while simultaneously navigating a visa procedure, open new possibilities for both methodology and analysis in studying the ‘paper border.’

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper assesses how environmental organisations shape expertise on biodiverse landscapes in Singapore. Locating the design of multispecies landscapes within regimes of truth-making and practical ethics (e.g. Ong, 2005; Tsing, 2015), the ethnographic study reveals tactics for environmental repair and bottom-up climate activism.

Paper Abstract:

This paper assesses how environmental organisations shape expertise on biodiverse landscapes in Singapore. In 2020, Singapore’s National Parks Board launched the OneMillionTrees campaign, which sought to intensify urban greening efforts in the city. Exploring the entanglements between future orientations, climate advocacy and environmental care, the in-depth investigation explores how various lanscape experts, including park rangers, community gardeners, tour guides, plant farmers and conservationists, envision sustainable urban development. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Singapore’s parks and gradens, the main aim of the research is to gain a better understanding of the shaping of expertise in transitioning into post-fossil societies. Despite their commitment to educating the general public and the younger generation about practical ways of conserving biodiversity, Singapore’s landscape experts have to cope with increased uncertainty about the future of urban forests. Locating the design of multispecies landscapes within regimes of truth-making and practical ethics (e.g. Ong, 2005; Tsing, 2015), the ethnographic study reveals tactics for environmental repair and bottom-up climate activism.

Paper Short Abstract:

his study examines the reorganization of social relationships among climate-displaced communities in the Sundarban delta, using Habermas's lifeworld, Victor turner's communitas . Based on interviews with 50 respondents and focus groups, it highlights self-reliance and sustainability as keys to resilience and social cohesion.

Paper Abstract:

Rehabilitating communities has been a major challenge in the context of India where classic cases of failed resettlement such as the Narmada valley bring painful memories of the internally displaced population. This study examines how social relationships are rearranged in communities affected by natural disasters using Habermas’s lifeworld and victor turner's communitas, Disaster led displacement has long-term impact on vulnerable littoral communities (Mustak, 2022) and it has a profound implication for pre-existing social networks, forcing people to adjust to new social situations while attempting to start over. This study will focus on how cyclone displaced communities in the Bay of Bengal delta rim can be supported using the “sustainability and self-reliance principles”, which will help build resilience and maintain long-term social cohesiveness. Reorganising social relationships after resettlement is about more than just restoring what has been lost, it is also about building a resilient community that aligns with larger social goals of self-reliance for sustainable development. The fieldwork was conducted using qualitative methodology- semi structured interviews, and the interview schedule was used to gather data from the field. This involved purposive and snowball sampling to select respondents who were displaced by climate induced disaster events. This study was based on 90 migrant’s households in the Sundarban delta. The analysis is based on detailed interviews carried out among 50 respondents and a series of focus group discussions with community members from different age groups and both genders.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the (im)mobility of general practitioners in Latvia’s rural areas, examining personal motivations, policy incentives, and systemic barriers. Through qualitative interviews, it highlights tensions between aspirations and rural realities, “unwriting” dominant policy narratives and exposing overlooked complexities in healthcare.

Paper Abstract:

Latvia’s healthcare sector faces profound challenges due to workforce shortages among general practitioners (GP), exacerbated by an ageing population, urban primacy, and depopulating rural areas. This presentation explores the (im)mobility of general practitioners in choosing where to practice, focusing on the social, professional, and infrastructural “borders” that influence their decisions. Through qualitative interviews with students, residents, and GPs, we trace the (un)written narratives that shape professional mobility: personal motivations and imaginations of one’s life, policy incentives, and systemic barriers.

In this paper, I argue that while policies attempt to address rural healthcare deficits through financial incentives that compensate the distance to the capital and the depopulation, the narratives shared by interlocutors reveal tensions between their professional and personal desires and the lived realities of rural practice. Therefore, this research asks: who moves to rural areas, and why? Who stays in urban centres, and what factors constrain mobility? By analysing these narratives, I explore the uneven distribution of healthcare resources as a reflection of structural (im)policies that go beyond the health care planning but echo complicated systemic patterns of centre-periphery dynamics.

In this case, writing about the (im)mobility of healthcare workers serves as a form of “unwriting” dominant state and policy narratives, shedding light on overlooked complexities in healthcare delivery. Ultimately, this work highlights the need for policies that address not only material and financial conditions but also the infrastructural, social and emotional landscapes of healthcare labour, particularly in rural regions facing population decline and marginalisation.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines healthcare disparities and migration patterns among marginalized tribal communities in rural Jharkhand. Using Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and ethnographic storytelling, it explores how inadequate healthcare infrastructure drives forced migration, while advocating for community-driven solutions to address health inequalities and reduce mobility.

Paper Abstract:

This paper critically examines healthcare disparities and migration patterns among marginalized tribal communities in rural Jharkhand, India, through the lens of ethnographic storytelling and Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). Despite global initiatives such as Health for All (HFA) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), regions like Giridih, Madhupur, and Pakur continue to grapple with structural health inequities. Limited healthcare infrastructure, socio-cultural barriers, and poor health literacy force rural populations into patterns of health migration, seeking care in distant locations.

Drawing on a mixed-methods approach—incorporating community mapping, focus group discussions, and in-depth interviews—this research foregrounds the voices of indigenous communities while tracing their mobile journeys for healthcare. By exploring both stasis and movement, the study highlights how local health systems fail to anchor communities, contributing to cyclical migration and perpetuating vulnerabilities.

In keeping with the panel’s focus on the epistemological politics of ethnographic writing, this paper reflects on PRA as a collaborative method of “unwriting” dominant narratives that marginalize rural experiences of mobility and healthcare. It demonstrates how participatory storytelling not only captures the embodied experiences of migration but also advocates for community-driven solutions. Such accounts challenge asymmetrical power relations by prioritizing indigenous knowledge systems and lived realities.

Ultimately, this paper engages with the intersection of migration, mobility regimes, and healthcare inequalities to reimagine policy solutions that reduce forced migration and ensure equitable access to healthcare for marginalized populations.