Rachel Murro, Alison M. El Ayadi, Rutuja Patil
et al.
Introduction: Maternal health in rural India has improved due to national initiatives, but inadequate healthcare provision persists across most sociodemographic groups. The connection between perinatal care and the widespread practice of Temporary Childbirth Migration (TCM)—returning to one's natal home for delivery and the postpartum period—remains unexplored. Methods: Cross-sectional data on migration and health visits were collected from a sample of 1288 women in the Vadu Health and Demographic Surveillance Site (HDSS) (Western Maharashtra) who gave birth in 2018–2022. Childbirth migration (exposure) was analyzed in three ways: binary (any migration), continuous (duration of stay), and multidimensional (duration of stay and change of provider). Outcomes included number of health visits – both facility check-ups and home visits by community health workers – and early antenatal care initiation. Multivariate poisson, negative binomial and logistic regressions were used. Sensitivity analyses checked for recall bias, the influence of migration distance, and model misspecification. Results: Migrators and non-migrators had similar outcomes in early antenatal care initiation, facility visits (before and after pregnancy), and prenatal community health worker visits. Migrators had fewer postnatal community health worker visits (IRR = 0.80; 95 % CI 0.70–0.92). Among migrators, longer natal village stays were associated with fewer community health worker visits in the prenatal period (IRR = 0.92; 95 % CI 0.88–0.96) but not postnatally (IRR = 1.03; 95 % CI 1.00–1.07). Women who switched to a new provider upon arriving in their natal village had fewer facility-based prenatal (IRR = 0.86; 95 % CI 0.78–0.96) but more postnatal visits (IRR = 1.41; 95 % CI 1.06–1.87), regardless of how long they stayed. Conclusion: For women who return to their natal home for childbirth, duration of stay and changing providers upon arrival are linked to differences in receipt of maternal healthcare. Increased attention to the needs of mobile women during the perinatal period is necessary to ensure they can participate in key birth customs while receiving adequate healthcare.
Public aspects of medicine, Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration
About 900.000 Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals (FDMN)/ Rohingya refugees live in makeshift camps in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. During the COVID-19 pandemic, protective behaviors were particularly important in this setting of previous severe infectious disease outbreaks. To identify barriers, drivers and interventions for those behaviors, a scoping review of MEDLINE, Embase, Web of Science, Global Health and grey literature was conducted in October 2021 and updated in June 2024. The modified Capability-Opportunity-Motivation-Behavior (COM-B) framework and Behavior Change Wheel were used to organize available evidence. A total of 4014 (3654 in 2021, 360 in 2024) records were reviewed and 51 (38 in 2021, 13 in 2024) articles included. Articles reported on protective behaviors (as a general concept), handwashing, social distancing, isolation/quarantine, mask wearing, testing, treatment and vaccination. Barriers and drivers to these behaviors spanned all four COM factors reflecting both individual and environmental influences. Most frequently cited barriers and drivers were found in the motivation (e.g. belief, fear, trust) and physical opportunity (e.g. information, the physical camp environment) factors. Gaps in the evidence were views of health service providers, and differences between camps and population groups. Most interventions focused on information, education or training (e.g. campaigns, community engagement) and environmental restructuring (e.g. increased provision of WASH facilities, COVID-19 isolation and treatment centres). Most articles reported recommendations for interventions. There was some evidence of implementation but little evaluation. This review identified complex and inter-related barriers and drivers to COVID-19 protective behaviors in Cox's Bazar, and many interventions to address these. Addressing the above-mentioned evidence gaps would assist future development of effective targeted interventions, tailored to the needs of specific population groups.
Public aspects of medicine, Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration
The three language versions of Ian Campbell's poem series about the old jacaranda tree in a university coutryard presented here comprise a poem series in which he first wrote a poem in French in 1989, then an Indonesian language version which was published in the literary pages of an Indonesian newspaper (in Bandung, West Java) in 2004, and finally in English. Campbell regards this whole process as emblematic of his explorations in trilingual poetics, namely what does a 'concept'/poem idea look like if done in three of the languages with which he has some degree of written knowledge or fluency: English, French and Indonesian. This mirrors the three-pronged approach he took in an earlier edition of PORTAL - Vol. 14, No 1, April 2017, where the three language versions he wrote on a single theme were in English, Spanish, and Indonesian.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration, Sociology (General)
Abstract This article examines the phenomenon of people in movement by considering the human and environmental impact of export-oriented energy policies through the case study of Southern Tunisia’s territory and communities. The analysis aims to interrogate the neglected link between the social-economic context of territories hosting impactful energy infrastructures, the resulting control over ‘human’ and ‘natural’ ecosystems that inhabit these territories, and their consequent abandonment, leading to migration. The research sheds light on how coercive measures and oppressive policies prioritize maximal resource extraction, depriving local citizens of their agency. Consequently, communities no longer resist the establishment of energy infrastructure, leading to the abandonment of their land and the loss of control over natural resources. By adopting a political ecology approach, this article aims to expand the category of climate migrants arguing that the economic criterion cannot be omitted nor separated from the climatic one. The case study of Southern Tunisia exemplifies the dynamics of precarity and structural poverty underlying migration peculiar to territories where, paradoxically, high value-added resources such as oil and gas as well as renewable energy are extracted and exported.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration
In an era of accelerating global climate change, human mobility has reached unprecedented levels. While it is acknowledged that many cases of human migration in the context of climate change are forced or involuntary, particularly where adaptation measures have failed to achieve sufficient resiliency of communities against impending slow- and sudden-onset disasters. There are also many cases where migration is, itself, a voluntary adaptive measure to secure otherwise unattainable physical safety and life-sustaining resources. It is in these cases that migration can be viewed as adaptation. Under the right policy conditions, it is possible for such adaptive migration to save countless lives. Moreover, it can achieve remarkable health and well-being gains for otherwise vulnerable communities residing on environmentally degrading lands and disproportionately suffering from the health impacts of climate change. While several activists have spoken loudly on the topic of climate migration, emphasizing the human rights imperative for supportive global policy action, the public health community has not been equally vocal nor unanimous in its stance. This paper, a product of the World Federation of Public Health Associations (WFPHA) Environmental Health Working Group, aims to rectify this gap, by analyzing adaptive climate migration through a public health lens. In doing so, it argues that creating an enabling environment for adaptive climate migration is not just a human rights imperative, but also a public health one. This argument is supported by evidence demonstrating how creating such an enabling environment can synergistically support the fulfillment of key public health services and functions, as outlined under the internationally endorsed Global Charter for the Public's Health of the WFPHA.
Public aspects of medicine, Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration
In Kenya, internal migration continues to impact population redistribution, although few studies have looked at subnational variations of the intensities and their overall impact to this process. This study seeks to analyse subnational migration flows and their impact on population redistribution in Kenya. The study uses 1999 and 2009 census micro data to generate migration intensities for each county and map these using ARCGIS software, to show the distributional effects of migration on population for the period of investigation.
The findings confirm a shift in the migration patterns in the country over the ten-year period, and the effect on population redistribution in the country. There are wide county variations with net gainers, net losers, and emergence of inactive migration zones. Migrants are concentrated in counties with large, urbanised areas, although suburbanisation is emerging as secondary cities and urban areas attract migrants. Results from the spatial analysis shows that migration intensities are clustered such that neighbouring regions exhibit similar intensities, and two hotspots are visible, a high-high hotspot in Nairobi and Vihiga, and clustering of low intensities in Mombasa and adjacent counties. We conclude that while internal migration effectively contributes to population redistribution, the effect is waning as more regions become urbanised.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration
From a ‘provincial’ and (hopefully) self-aware European perspective, it is clear that cultural forms or practices that originated among African Americans have, beyond their value to African Americans themselves and people elsewhere, contributed tremendously to life on the European continent. Those contributions include everything from the political imaginaries of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, through philosophical thought, to literature, film, television, theatre, dance, sports, visual culture and everyday aesthetics. Most prominent, perhaps, have been forms of music—blues and jazz to r’n’b, rap, and hybrid electronic music forms—all of which have ‘furnished’ European listeners’ lives, whatever their so-called race. While deeply embedded racism can run through these processes of cultural flow, transfer, and appropriation, and numerous forms of exploitation are at work, in many cases there is also an ambiguous love for Black diasporic culture, at least according to the appropriating subjects’ view of themselves, which manifests itself in admiration, desire, a sense of affinity or connection, and sometimes in fantasies of ‘becoming black.’ This issue’s papers, which present case studies of what we will call Afro-Americanophilia, address the forms, ambiguities and politics involved in these cultural processes in 20th-century Germany.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration, Sociology (General)
This article examines the changes towards more gender-sensitive interpretations of refugee status in international and national asylum laws and policies within the context of contemporary and historical global power relations. It also analyzes the changes in the language that can be found in the international UNHCR guidelines for the protection of women asylum seekers, U.S. national guidelines for assessing gender-related asylum claims, and recent U.S. court decisions assessing the gendered claims of women. Among the analyzed court cases, the focus is on the 2005 Mohammed case due to its problematic court decision and legal interpretations. Finding the Western countries’ instrumentalization of the international refugee protection system crucial for understanding the contemporary asylum system and women asylum seekers, the argument connects the historical conditions with the way in which the protection of women refugees from “cultural” gendered violence has been articulated in asylum politics in the U.S. The author’s overall findings are that international law, governmental organizations, and liberal women’s human rights NGOs have shaped the international and national legal protection of (women) asylum seekers in such a way that it reproduces global inequalities in its representation of “Third World” women and their culture, uses women asylum seekers fleeing from violence for the purpose of exercising Western cultural superiority, and covers up the restrictive and racist Western asylum politics towards immigrants and asylum seekers.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration
In 2007, Li Ke’s novel A Story of Lala’s Promotion (Du Lala Shengzhi Ji) became a bestseller among Chinese white-collar workers in foreign-owned (Western) companies and struck a chord with the Chinese middle class. The novel revolves around office politics, Western company culture and the white-collar lifestyle, the ‘shelved ladies’ phenomenon and middle-class aesthetics. To decipher the embedded cultural codes of this book, this study undertakes a textual analysis of the plots of A Story of Lala’s Promotion and its filmic adaptation, Go Lala Go! (Du Lala Shengzhi Ji dir. Xu Jinglei, 2010). This paper conducts a trans-media adaption study (from fiction to film) to examine three interrelated themes in the novel and the film. First, focusing on the influence of Western corporate culture on Chinese white-collar workers under economic globalisation, the widely circulating rules of Western workplaces are interpreted, clarifying the acculturating process of Western culture over its Chinese counterpart. The paper further explains that on the platform provided by foreign companies, and with the influence and training of Western corporate culture, intelligent and diligent young Chinese aspirational women struggle and realise their dreams in the workplace. Second, employing a feminist perspective, an attempt is made to address the situation of contemporary Chinese white-collar women represented by the contemporary social phenomenon of the ‘shelved ladies’, which also serves as an emblem of female independence and individualism. Third, through an analysis of the filmic adaptation, which focuses on the white-collar female’s lifestyle and consumption habits, the paper also highlights the contemporary Chinese population’s pursuit of a middle-class identity and aesthetic that mirrors the overwhelming consumerism of post-socialist China.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration, Sociology (General)
After the last war it would have seemed racism and antisemitism were called to disappear. But today they have come back and the history of their return can be traced back. Antisemitism would seem to have been relaunched as anticapitalism and as support in the fight for freedom of the palestinian people —or asenvy, mainly islamic, of today’s jews’ success in their settlement—. Racism on the other hand has suffered a transformation from the physical to the cultural and is activated today through discriminations launched on a planetary scale rather than coming from within the nations and is often connected with international tensions provoked by immigration. Finally racism is also taking shape in the need to rewrite the beginning and legitimations of the histories ofsuffering.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration
This is a full study of the legal system applicable to selfemployed foreigners wishing to carry out an economic activity in Spain. The focus varies according to the country of origin of the individual, whether it lies within the European Economic Community, whether it is a country with which the European Union has co-operation and association agreements or finally, whether it is under the general regime. The utilitarian perspective which considers immigration as necessary manual labour has justified more efficient legal mechanisms to facilitate the employment of immigrant manual workers. These mechanisms do not apply to self-employed workers. The lack of interest of legislators in this type of worker is highlighted by the suppression of motivation and refusal of the mandatory visa. The detailed analysis of the anticipated administrative requirements emphasises that within the labour legislation for immigrants there is a marked difference between those who work for an employer and those who are self-employed and there is no correspondence or comparison with the more far reaching policies of the labour doctrine with regard to the rights and guarantees of both categories of workers.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration
This study argues in favour of including an analytical focus on in/visibilities in order to gain insights into the racialization processes as experienced by individuals who have become subjected to derogatory categorizations. This paper examines how individuals’ experiences of everyday racism relate to their struggles to belong. In this paper, I discuss how the theme of in/visibility emerges in the accounts of young Kurds, who have migrated to Finland at a young age and grown up in the country. What kind of visual lexica of belonging do they employ when narrating their experiences of everyday racism? And relatedly, how do they speak of boundaries of (national) belonging and nonbelonging? The results show that “Finnishness” denotes “racial” belonging to the nation. Young Kurds contrast “white Finnishness” with racializing categorizations that indicate non-belonging to the Finnish nation. They have been labelled with such categorizations in social situations in the public space or at work by people they have encountered. However, there is space for young Kurds to contest such racializing categorizations and to negotiate their belonging to Finland by mastering the Finnish language and, in some cases, having Finnish citizenship.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration, Communities. Classes. Races
The paper explores some of the issues concerning the transmission of Chinese medicine in Australia, its practitioner training and the future of Chinese medicine as a distinct medical discipline in the Australian context. In China over the last century Chinese medicine was overhauled in order to align it with the biomedical perspective prevalent in the West. These changes, in turn, had important consequences for the transmission of CM in Australia and the West. But while the biomedicalisation of CM has offered the path of least resistance, it has also lead to unworkable simplifications and methodological failures. The paper thus argues for a renewed access to the tradition’s primary sources in order to ally the distinctive features and methods of traditional practice with biomedicine, as an alternative to an outright integration into biomedical practice.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration, Sociology (General)
Ida Ayu Oka Rusmini is a major contemporary Indonesian author. She has published two novels, Tarian Bumi (2000) and Kenanga (2003a), a collection of short stories, (Sagra, 2001), and a volume of poetry, Patiwangi (2003b, republished in 2007 as Warna Kita, with the omission of some 12 poems). Born in Jakarta in 1967 of Balinese parents, she was a member of the highest Balinese caste, the brahmana caste, but renounced this status, including her title, after her marriage to the East Javanese essayist and poet Arif B. Prasetyo. Oka Rusmini is a graduate of the Indonesian Studies Department, Udayana University, and lives in Den Pasar where she works as a journalist for the Bali Post. Most of Oka Rusmini’s prose works explore the constraints into which the socioreligious practices of caste place all members of society, but most especially women. Both of her novels tell of a woman’s abandonment of her brahmin caste status as the result of her marriage to a sudra. The title of the poetry book, Patiwangi, refers to the ritual practice by which this degradation is confirmed, and the poem which gives the book its title bears the footnote: ‘Patiwangi: pati = death; wangi = fragrant. Patiwangi is a ritual that is performed on a noble women in her Village Temple to remove her noble status as a consequence of having married a man of a lower caste. The ritual often has a serious psychological impact on noble women’ (107). In both novels, and many short stories and poems, their loss of status brings enormous scorn and hardship to the major woman characters. Nevertheless, as we shall see, stepping outside patriarchally-dominated caste ties may also provide an ambiguous freedom for any woman who is positioned to take advantage of the opportunities which the modern, potentially secular, nation state of Indonesia, offers her. In this paper, I am interested in the way in which the short story, ‘Cenana’ (Sagra, 270-318), uses a traditional myth to deal various cross-caste transgressions in contemporary Balinese society. The story draws on one of the foundation myths of medieval Javanese history, the story of Ken Angrok, founder of the dynasty of Singhasari, East Java, in 1222 AD, and his consort, Ken Dedes, the wife of Ken Angrok’s predecessor. To my knowledge, although the myth has been the subject of a number of modern literary works, Oka Rusmini’s is the only account by a Balinese woman. Through its focus on the transgressions committed by strong female characters of all caste backgrounds, and dissolute male characters, Oka Rusmini’s narrative in ‘Cenana’ allows for a revision of conceptions of feminine agency in a society based on respect for high caste men and marriage to them.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration, Sociology (General)
The history of the emigration of Bulgarian Muslim Turks to Turkey is more than a century old. The violation of the human rights of ethnic Turks by the totalitarian regime during the 1980s resulted in the most massive and unpredictable migration wave ever seen in that history. This article examines the complexity of factors and motivations of the 1989 emigration which included almost half of the ethnic Turks living in Bulgaria and constituting until that time 9 percent of the total population. The author considers the strong and long-lasting effect of this emigration—followed by the subsequent return of half of the emigrants after the fall of the regime—both on Bulgaria's economy and on the political life of the society. The article aims also at providing a better understanding of the character of ethnic conflicts in posttotalitarian Eastern Europe.
This article examines the UN policies encouraging emigration from the Palestinian refugee camps through educating Palestinians and sending them for work abroad. Data show that emigration is more related to certain types of employment, especially skilled labor and white-collar jobs, than to employment per se. The data were collected, through personal interviews, from Dair El Balah refugee camp in Gaza Strip in 1986. There are 291 observations representing individuals who are 19 years old or over. A major conclusion of this study is that the educational policies initiated and operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) contributed to the dispersion of about one third of the refugees in the 1960s and the 1970s.