Periodic Reporting for period 1 - HEIEL (Healthcare Encounters in Immigrants’ Everyday Lives)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2022-09-01 al 2024-08-31
This project looks at Chinese immigrants’ everyday healthcare choices, practices, and encounters in Italy. The project has two specific objectives. The first specific objective is to explores Chinese immigrants’ everyday healthcare practices in interactions with various healthcare resources, both formal and informal. How do these subjects perceive their bodies and manage their health? How do they engage and interact with both formal and informal healthcare systems in their everyday lives? The second specific objective is to elucidate how Chinese immigrants’ biopolitics affect their social integration and identity formation. How do their everyday healthcare perceptions, experiences, and engagement contribute to (re)shaping their ethnic and immigrant identities in the host society?
The publications have respectively addressed the issues on Chinese migrants' perceptions and management of body and health from the perspectives of family dynamics and generational differences, the changing health practices since the pandemic, and their navigation in the work regimes. These publications have provided explanations of Chinese immigrants' health perceptions and practices in specific social, cultural, and historical contexts.
The publications have respectively addressed the issues on Chinese migrants' perceptions and management of body and health from the perspectives of family dynamics and generational differences, the changing health practices since the pandemic, and their navigation in the work regimes. These publications have provided explanations of Chinese immigrants' health perceptions and practices in specific social, cultural, and historical contexts.
The Researcher has successfully completed 9-month in-depth interviews and participant observation in Bologna. She also completed three-month ethnographic fieldwork in Prato, by following the research participants' social networks through snowballing. Based on ethnographic data she collected during the fellowship, she had delivered 6 conference publications, 1 invited lecture, and 1 journal publication to date. She also has 1 additional journal manuscript under review.
The main results have been primarily presented in the two publications so far. The journal article "Hopefully a Good Life", published by the open-access peer-reviewed journal Anthropologica, explores the generational differences in the understandings of the good life among the Chinese migrants in Italy. The article argues that such generational differences stem from the shifting tensions between the contested racial and national orders in association with Italy’s economic stagnation and China’s global ascendancy.
The journal article "'Nothing is More Important than Health!': Yangsheng Fever among Chinese
Immigrants in Post-Pandemic Italy.", under review by the open-access journal Migration and Society, investigates how Chinese migrants manage their health in a work culture which requires long and intense working routines and seems to be incompatible with popular Western conceptions of health and wellbeing. Focusing on their discourses and practices of yangsheng (nurturing or cultivating life), this paper explores how Chinese migrants actively mobilize the resources available to them in order to negotiate for a healthy body. It highlights how these diasporic and biopolitical subjects, as ethical bio-citizens, persistently pursue a good life through migration, labor and self-care.
The main results have been primarily presented in the two publications so far. The journal article "Hopefully a Good Life", published by the open-access peer-reviewed journal Anthropologica, explores the generational differences in the understandings of the good life among the Chinese migrants in Italy. The article argues that such generational differences stem from the shifting tensions between the contested racial and national orders in association with Italy’s economic stagnation and China’s global ascendancy.
The journal article "'Nothing is More Important than Health!': Yangsheng Fever among Chinese
Immigrants in Post-Pandemic Italy.", under review by the open-access journal Migration and Society, investigates how Chinese migrants manage their health in a work culture which requires long and intense working routines and seems to be incompatible with popular Western conceptions of health and wellbeing. Focusing on their discourses and practices of yangsheng (nurturing or cultivating life), this paper explores how Chinese migrants actively mobilize the resources available to them in order to negotiate for a healthy body. It highlights how these diasporic and biopolitical subjects, as ethical bio-citizens, persistently pursue a good life through migration, labor and self-care.
The project contributes to studies on migration and health that are increasingly being recognized as a priority for global public health in a period when migration is a global reality. It also contributes to debates about biopolitics in terms of the mode of everyday management of the body and health, and identity politics in terms of processes of social inclusion/exclusion through everyday healthcare practices.
The project provides a new narrative of immigrant health amid ambiguous power dynamics in which immigrant subjects are simultaneously economically privileged while socially disadvantaged. It also offers new insights into immigrants’ identity formation from the angle of healthcare inclusion and exclusion while situating the process within the transnational context of transforming geopolitics. This bottom-up ethnographic study will ultimately contribute to theoretical debates on immigrant health, biopolitics and identity, as well as to policy making regarding migration and health.
The project provides a new narrative of immigrant health amid ambiguous power dynamics in which immigrant subjects are simultaneously economically privileged while socially disadvantaged. It also offers new insights into immigrants’ identity formation from the angle of healthcare inclusion and exclusion while situating the process within the transnational context of transforming geopolitics. This bottom-up ethnographic study will ultimately contribute to theoretical debates on immigrant health, biopolitics and identity, as well as to policy making regarding migration and health.