on behalf of Umut Erel




Migrant Mothers Caring for the Future:
Creative interventions in making new citizens

Seminar 1: Citizenship, Migration and Mothering

Friday 22 November 2013
10.00am-5.00pm
Open University (London regional office)
1-11 Hawley Crescent
Camden Town
London NW1 8NP
Map and directions: http://www3.open.ac.uk/contact/maps.aspx?contactid=1

This seminar will theorize and discuss the policy implications of migrant mothers' citizenship

Keynote speaker:
Professor   Sarah Van Walsum, VU University, Amsterdam

Other speakers:
o       Rosalind Bragg  (Maternity Alliance)
o       Dr Tine Brouckaert  (Ghent University, Belgium)
o       Professor  Isabel Dyck (Queen Mary University London)
o       Dr Umut Erel (Open University)
o       Donn Flynn ( Migrants Right Network)
o       Dr Ronit Lentin (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
o       Lutleja  Nuzi   (Sphresa Programme)
o       Tracey Reynolds (London South Bank University)


Seminar convenors: Dr Umut Erel (CCIG, Open University) and Professor Tracey Reynolds (Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, LSBU)

This event is free but spaces are limited to 50 delegates. To reserve a place email [log in to unmask]     by  12 November 2013

For further details of this networking event visit http://weekscentreforsocialandpolicyresearch.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/summer-newsletter-20131.pdf
http://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/events/migrant-mothers-caring-for-the-future

Keynote paper

Different perspectives on Citizenship, Migration and Mothering in Migration Law

Sarah Van Walsum

This talk will address the different values that have and are being attached to migrants as mothers in migration law in the Netherlands and at the EU level. It does this  by reviewing case law of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) and of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) against the background of the Dutch case. After discussing an essay by Wendy Brown on the role of the state in currently changing gender orders, the article ends by questioning to what degree the tensions, contradictions and confusion regarding the relationship between citizenship, migration and mothering, might open space for a feminist response to increasing state control over women's lives.

Sarah van Walsum is Professor in Migration Law and Family Ties at the VU University, Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Her main fields of interest are: transnational family relations, family migration law, migrant domestic workers and women and migration law. Together with Thomas Spijkerboer she edited the volume: Women and Immigration Law. New variations on classical feminist themes, published by Routledge-Cavendish in 2007. Her most recent monograph is: The Family and the Nation. Dutch family migration policies in the context of changing family norms, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2008.


Other papers and biographies

Undocumented mothers on the national stage.

Tine Brouckaert

Undocumented persons are juridical excluded from citizenship. However because of their embodiment that often differs the masculine white norm, they are also socially and culturally excluded from citizenship. Although, through their reproductive status as a mother their political citizenship is ambivalent and contested (hooks 1990; Kershaw 2010; 2011). This paper addresses their response to so-called “niches” (Nicholls 2013) in citizenship discourses and legal categories, setting the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. In their aim to obtain a legal residence permit, I consider here their “becoming mother” an active and political act of citizenship.
This paper draws from a longitudinal in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with ten undocumented migrant mothers. The case studies are composed of a heterogeneous group of women of color in terms of age, class, national and ethnic belongings, in order to primarily focus on the role of undocumented status, gender and identity as a mother rather than to focus upon national, cultural or ethnical belonging. This paper builds upon the post-migration routes of some of the key participants to this research. Responses of undocumented women towards the legal framework seemed to arise from their most intimate sphere and applied to the reproductive dimension of their embodiedness. Confronted by citizenship discourses, ensuring the communities coherence by excluding and including forms of kinship, the women engendered an embodied fictive maternal identity (Butler 1999: 417). It is in the imitation of this figure that enable them to become subjects. I here claim their action as a temporal social constructed identity that attest political citizenship potential.

Dr Tine Brouckaert has a PhD in Comparative Sciences of Culture at the Ghent University and the University of Saint-Etienne. Her dissertation “Giving Birth to Citizenship” (original: Accoucher la citoyenneté. Expériences et témoignages de femmes sans-papiers à propos de leur travail maternel) addresses questions on mothering with an undocumented citizenship status. Her research interests are critical citizenship studies, mothering, anthropology of gender and diversity, postcolonial and feminist studies.

Migrant mothers, human capital and citizenship: hidden care
Isabel Dyck
In this paper I reflect upon the hidden contribution to a nation’s developing citizenry through the translation of different forms of capital in broadly conceived acts of care by migrant mothers. Focusing primarily on the home and, through its extension into the neighbourhood, I examine how sites of capital transformation are coded ‘domestic’ yet are integrally involved in a wider ‘place-making’. Drawing on qualitative data from a set of studies with migrant women from different sending countries and living in different neighbourhoods in a major Canadian city, the paper comments on how negotiation and translation of cultural and emotional capital in the course of quotidian life results in the transformation of cultural identities, bodies, and place identities as immigrants strive to ‘belong’. These transformations illustrate the intertwining of immigrant status and the local in ways that question the utility of the common orientation in immigration policy of restricting the notion of human capital with economic potential in labour markets and its inherent gendered assumptions. Further, the paper supports other work that notes the fragmented meaning of ‘citizenship’ according to scale, as city, nation-state and transnational identifications collide.

Professor Isabel Dyck is a social and feminist geographer and a member of the Health, Place and Society research theme. She taught at the University of British Columbia prior to joining the School of Geography at Queen Mary in 2005. Her work has contributed to the development of health and feminist geography, theoretically and through methodological innovation. Her main current research interests concern the provision of long-term care in the home and various issues related to immigration and resettlement. Gender and generational differences in relation to immigration experiences provide a particular focus. Recent projects use the lens of therapeutic landscapes from health geography to examine immigrant women’s re-making of home and to investigate the continuities and transformations of health practices through processes of migration. This research has been conducted in Vancouver, Canada, and London. In addition to gaining insight into how place, culture and health practices interweave dynamically, this work shows the centrality of the materiality and meanings of ‘home’ in how health is defined and managed. A range of qualitative methods has been used in these studies, including film.


A migrant died: Abortion and the politics of motherhood in Ireland

Dr Ronit Lenin

The death in hospital of 17 weeks pregnant Indian dentist Savita Halappanavar in October 2012, rekindled Ireland’s long standing abortion debate. Locating her case in the politics of birth in Ireland, this paper situates Halappanavar’s story firstly within Ireland’s gendered birthing politics, where women are cast as m/others, and  secondly within the briefer history of casting migrant women’s birthing practices as threatening the integrity of Irish citizenship. The paper makes two claims. Firstly, I argue  that migrant m/others are the female version of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘bare life’, or homo sacer – femina sacra – she whose life can be taken by the sovereign racial state. Secondly, after Eithne Luibheid, I propose that the casting of migrant m/others as disrupting Irish national integrity originates from an unquestioned heteronormativity and white privilege, and that migrant m/others, in 'childbearing against the state', consolidate rather than disrupt  Irish nationhood.


Ronit Lentin is associate professor of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin. She has published extensively on race and gender, racism in Ireland, Israel/Palestine. Her books include Racism and Antiracism in Ireland (2002, with Robbie McVeigh), Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (2002, with Nahla Abdo), After Optimism? Ireland, Racism and Globalisation (2006, with Robbie McVeigh), Race and State (2006/8, with Alana Lentin), Thinking Palestine (2008), Co-Memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba (2010) and Migrant Activism and Integration from Below in Ireland (2012, with Elena Moreo).


Don Flynn has worked in the field of migration policy since the mid-1970s, when he started work as a caseworker at a London law centre.  Since then he has worked as policy officer for the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, a national legal rights organisation. He currently leads the Migrants’ Rights Network, which works to improve networking between migrant and refugee community organisations and other civil society organisations working to support the rights of all migrants.  He is also involved in networking with migrants’ rights organisations across Europe, currently serving at the Chair of PICUM – the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants.He chairs the steering group of the UK Race & Europe Network (UKREN).. UKREN brings together groups concerned with racial equality in the UK with an interest in monitoring and influencing development in the rest of Europe.  He regularly writes on themes relating to the politics of immigration and blogs on the MRN website, (www.migrantsrights.org.uk). He tweets on @donflynnmrn.

Luljeta Nuzi is the founder of Shpresa Programme  an user led organization that works to promote the integration of the Albanian community  here in UK( mainly mothers and children). She believes on integration with dignity and not assimilation and as has chosen as vehicles to achieve this, the social entrepreneur and community organsing movements. Shpresa works in partnership with a range of organization especially mainstream school and specialized organization such as WTC and Solace to address specific issues such as mental health and domestic violence. Luljeta is a strong believer that everyone coming to this country  have skill to offer and should be encouraged and supported to overcome difficulties that they are facing at first , create a stimulating environment  for them   so they can play and active role in community and contribute  to society





Dr. Umut Erel
Faculty of Social Sciences
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)1908 654461


Recent Publications

Co-edited SI on Gender and Transnationalism http://ejw.sagepub.com/content/19/4.toc

Umut Erel Engendering transnational space: Migrant mothers as cultural currency speculators European Journal of Women's Studies November 2012 19: 460-474, doi:10.1177/1350506812466612   http://ejw.sagepub.com/content/19/4/460.abstract
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