Migrations and care ethics: when borders cut across healthcare

While borders are increasingly militarized in European peripheries, humanitarian activities tend to expand in parallel. Spaces of care are being redefined, without escaping however the workings of the border regime of mobility management. Drawing on research conducted in the framework of the project EU Border Care, this paper offers to explore points of tension and convergence between the workings of the management of bodies’ mobility on the one hand, and the logics of medical care for these same bodies on the other. Ethnographies of perinatal and maternity care that feed into this presentation have been conducted in Melilla, the Spanish enclave in the North of Morocco and Mayotte, the French department situated in the Comoros archipelago.

Speaker

Nina Sahraoui is currently Post-doctoral Research Associate at the European University Institute within the EU Border Care project. This ERC-funded research project is a comparative study of maternity care among undocumented migrants on the peripheries of the European Union. Previously, Nina completed a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship at London Metropolitan University. Her doctoral research focused on migrant workers’ experiences in older-age care in London, Paris and Madrid, leading to a gendered political-economy analysis of the articulation of employment, care and migration regimes. Nina equally conducted research on diasporas, transnational mobilization and the migration–development nexus, notably in relation to the Moroccan case. Amongst her most recent publications is the volume co-edited with Megha Amrith Gender, Work and Migration. Agency in Gendered Labour Settings published in 2018 by Routledge.