Lindsey WEst
"Who Counts? Birth and Citizenship Experiences of Migrant Women in Geneva."
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Abstract
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This proposal requests funding to support pre-dissertation fieldwork in Geneva, Switzerland over the summer of 2009. The goal of my fieldwork is to investigate the childbearing experiences of migrant women in Geneva. Ethnographic analysis of reproductive encounters illuminates the impacts of demographic politics, state power, nation-building, and medicine on daily life for migrant communities. The central pieces of my research methodology will be participant observation research in the hospital where I will spend time in primary care clinics for undocumented and asylum seeker patients, as well as on the obstetrics floor. I will conduct open-ended interviews, with women patients about their reproductive histories and values around childbearing and with doctors and hospital staff.
I chose Switzerland because in 2008 Switzerland had a total fertility rate of 1.44 children per woman (CIA), the European average, and far below the level required for population replacement of 2.2. In addition, 34.1% of the population is non-Swiss and there is extensive diversity in the socioeconomic positions of migrants in the city. This broad category includes people in the professional, privileged UN workforce, asylum seekers, and undocumented domestic workers. This fieldwork is partially inspired by a gap in the literatures of immigration and fertility, which has focused on either fertility or immigration. In this way it reifies the divide articulated in nationalist rhetoric of reproduction and immigration being separate and opposed. My fieldwork asks whether and how concerns over the boundaries of citizenship and national inclusion play out in the provision of reproductive health care.
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