Browse
The last chapter provides a summary of the study’s main findings and highlights their theoretical significance. By including the input of migrant, non-migrating relatives, and migration and health service providers, the chapter addresses the relevance of taking this research into account for health and migration policymaking, and migrant advocacy and assistance transnationally. While acknowledging the study limitations, the chapter provides practical recommendations and emphasizes the urgency to advance migrant rights, collective health, and social justice across borders.
This chapter focuses on the 11 psycho-sociocultural mechanisms that migrants and non-migrating relatives utilized to cope with the effects of outward and return migration that were identified and conceptualized in the study of the Ecuadorean case in the context of other similar Latin American migratory processes. Disillusion adjustment, paralyzing nostalgia, motivating nostalgia, denied migrant health, normalization of malaise, pain encapsulation, well-being ideal, transgenerational goals, strategic return, settling readjustment, and involuntary return rebound are explained including significant portions of stories of health and migration shared by research participants in individual and group interviews and community workshops. The psycho-sociocultural coping mechanisms are explained in relation to one another and health processes, and tied to underlying economic, migration, health, and sociocultural policies and politics in countries of origin, transit, and destination.
This chapter introduces the research project by explaining the relationship between migration and health, the particularities of the Ecuadorean case, and the unique interdisciplinary and critical theoretical and methodological angle of the study. Moreover, it maps the conceptual framework that emerged from the transnational investigation of migration from Ecuador to the United States, Spain, and back, and highlights its contribution to the body of literature on health and migration. Finally, it provides a detailed account of the sample of migrants, non-migrating relatives, and health and migration service providers from which the research was developed, a reflection on activist research and ethics, and outlines the rest of the book.
Drawing from an activist research project spanning Loja, Santo Domingo, New York, New Jersey, and Barcelona, this book offers a feminist intersectional analysis of the impact of migration on health and well-being.
It assesses how social inequalities and migration and health policies, in Ecuador and destination countries, shape the experiences of migrants. The author also explores how individual and collective action challenges health, geopolitical, gender, sexual, ethnoracial, and economic disparities, and empowers communities.
This is a thorough analysis of interpersonal, institutional, and structural mechanisms of marginalization and resistance. It will inform policy and research for better responses to migration’s negative effects on health, and progress towards greater equality and social justice.
This chapter focuses on the seven health processes triggered by migration that were identified and conceptualized in the study of the Ecuadorean case in the context of other similar Latin American migratory processes. Reflective mourning, active migrant trauma, passive migrant trauma, migratory stress, migrant crises triggers, return shock, and unrecognized migratory resilience are explained through excerpts from stories of health and migration shared by migrants and non-migrating relatives in individual and group interviews and community workshops as well as quantitative and qualitative data collected through surveys. The health processes are explained in relation to one another and psycho-sociocultural coping mechanisms, and tied to underlying economic, migration, health, and sociocultural policies and politics in countries of origin, transit, and destination.
This chapter explains how migrants and non-migrating relatives dealt with the relational effects generated by outward and return migratory processes, which included novel family dynamics, members, ties, and conflicts. The psycho-sociocultural mechanism of family de/re-construction, at the core of migrants’ and relatives’ ability to cope with their altered family realities, is analyzed together with the set of five complementary mechanisms of communication distortion, subordination to concealment and deception, unspoken pacts, resentment and detachment, and sensible comprehension. This chapter incorporates significant portions of stories of health and migration from individual and group interviews and community workshops held during the transnational research. Post-migration family coping mechanisms are explained in relation to other mechanisms and health processes, and tied to underlying economic, migration, health and sociocultural policies and politics in countries of origin, transit, and destination.
This chapter explores how migrants and non-migrating relatives interact with formal border politics, including geographical boundaries between countries; national and international policies regarding migration, residency, and citizenship; and racial/ethnic, gender/sexual, class, and other intersecting social structures and practices of inequality in places of origin, transit, and destination. Migrants and non-migrating relatives learn how to navigate formal border politics and can maintain, recreate, contest, and change them. In doing so, they enact their own informal border politics. When these informal border politics result in challenging and dismantling formal border politics, a transformative border politics is unearthed. By including significant portions of stories of health and migration from individual and group interviews and community workshops held during the transnational research, this chapter shows how migrants and non-migrating relatives traverse, rework, and transcend geopolitical, gender/sexual, ethnoracial, and socioeconomic borders.
This chapter presents the origins, process, and findings of an online research project, Social Work in 40 Objects. The project is ongoing, and its aims are to explore the possibility of discovering meanings in social work through material objects and the stories that attach to them. The experiment is proving to be a quantitative success, with over 160 objects to date (2020) from 26 countries donated to a virtual exhibition of social work. Qualitative success is evident in the many facets of social work refracted through the objects and the wide variety of relationships to social work apparent in those who are participating. The research methodologies that support the experiment are explored, as well as the theoretical perspectives that have deepened the analysis of the findings: these include material culture theory and museum ethnography, especially the notion of ‘charged objects’. The ‘snowball’ method speeded and broadened the donation of objects and a ‘bricolage’ process helped in the playful clustering of groups of objects into themed ‘collections’. The chapter explores the learning from this experiment and presents a suggested typology of objects.
This chapter describes the use of different artistic expression strategies in a participatory action research process. The protagonists of this project are young people with intellectual disabilities and their families in the context of a socio-occupational training programme at the university. The main objective of the research is to explore themes around the overprotection–autonomy continuum from the participants’ perspectives. A set of artistic techniques from different disciplines (visual art, performing art, and music) were used as a means to discuss and define the terms and their implications. Critically, this was in a participatory manner. At the beginning, the young people and their parents worked separately and independently following the same research steps and performing similar activities. The process and the methodology created opportunities to bridge the gap and increase mutual understanding that would not be possible through the daily interactions of normal life. Concrete examples are presented that highlight the benefits and difficulties of introducing activities not commonly found in a university environment. The analysis also includes a critical reflection about the possible use of art techniques in participatory action research projects with people with intellectual disabilities.
Arts exposure and engagement have been used throughout the history of the social work profession, particularly in community-oriented forms of social work and social group work. As one of the leading voices of the settlement house movement, Jane Addams, along with cofounder Ellen Gates Starr, championed the use of the arts at the Chicago-based settlement, Hull House (). This practice lives on today as practitioners, researchers, and scholars argue for the inclusion of arts- and music-based activities in social work practice, education, and research (; ). While several expressive therapies have grown into substantial fields of practice with bodies of literature to support their efficacy and effectiveness (), including art, dance, music, and play therapies, these areas of practice tend to focus on micro-level interventions to address behavioural and medical health problems. There is a small but growing body of literature exploring the use of music-based activities to create opportunities for empowerment (Travis et al., and to engage participants’ talents, strengths, and interests (, While these studies show that music-based activities have the power and potential to engage, harness, and foster participants’ strengths, less is known about how these types of activities might be used as nondeliberative participatory research methods to build connection and community, particularly within groups. This chapter will explore this idea, beginning with brief reviews of Norma theory of nondeliberative practice and participatory research methods, followed by a case study of a research project I conducted that used audio documentary as a nondeliberative participatory research method.
