Healthcare encounters in immigrants’ everyday lives
The main goal of HEIEL is to examine how Chinese immigrants in Italy perceive their bodies, manage their health, and experience the local healthcare system in the context of national austerity, rising anti-immigrant sentiments, and on-going political, social, and demographic transformations and how these perceptions and experiences affect their identity formation. This ethnographic study will be based on 12 months of fieldwork mainly involving in-depth interviews and participant observation in Bologna and Rome. It will provide a new bottom-up narrative of immigrant health amid ambiguous power dynamics in which immigrant subjects are simultaneously economically privileged and socially vulnerable. It is a timely research project that locates immigrant subjects' everyday healthcare practices at the intersection of their transnational migration process, dynamic political and social realities, and geopolitics. It is a comparative study that examines structural considerations and investigates how immigrants negotiate and choose among formal and informal healthcare providers in a multi-ethnic EU welfare state and why informal medical treatments are often preferred over formally legitimate and cheaper public services. It is a multi-sited ethnography of encounters that examines healthcare seekers' interactions with various types of healthcare providers, institutions, and authorities, which may affect their healthcare choices and practices. It is an interdisciplinary project at the intersection of anthropology, sociology of migration, and public health. This project will inspire healthcare and immigration policymaking, as well as contributing to theoretical debates surrounding immigrant health, as well as biopolitics and identity. The HEIEL will ultimately contribute to the ER’s career development plan of becoming a leading interdisciplinary scholar of Chinese migration to Europe.