Diasporic Neurology -Migration, Slow Pain & Transnational Dying

Yasmin Gunaratnam, Goldsmiths, University of London

In this session, I will bring together my research with dying migrants to the UK with feminist theories of the temporality of "slow" social violations (Berlant), 'haunting' (Cho) and relational materialities (Wilson)). Using case story examples, I will describe the hybridisations between the bio and the social that can be revealed and created by disease and impairment, locating and highlighting the different elements within a 'psychosomatic economy' (Wilson 1999) that crosses continents and times. I will argue that debility, violence and a wearing a way of all kinds, stand and lie at the meeting points between the mounting paradox of the global demand for healthy aspirational migrant workers and responsibilities for long term care and pain relief. In discussing somatosensory migrations, mixings and re-arrangements beneath the of skin the debilitated migrant, I will offer thoughts on how we might crip (McRuer) migration and mobility studies.

Yasmin Gunaratnam is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College (University of London) and teaches and writes on culture, gender, migration, disability, illness, death and qualitative research methods. She is author of ‘Researching Race and Ethnicity’ (Sage, 2003) and has jointly edited ‘Narratives and Stories in Health Care’ with David Oliviere (Oxford University Press, 2009). Yasmin’s latest book ‘Death and the Migrant’ (2013, Bloomsbury Academic) brings together her interest in stories with her sociological research on transnational dying and intercultural care. Yasmin’s recent British Academy Fellowship project, ‘Case Stories’, on social pain, migration, dying and bereavement can be found at case-stories.org

Organiser: Dr Gina Heathcote

Contact email: gh21@soas.ac.uk

Contact Tel: 020 7898 4367