Care with Me: The Transformative Potential of Migrant-Level Care Centered on Emotion

• In Event: 2184 - Section on Medical Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 12. Caregiving and Emotional Labor

Abstract

Practitioners and scholars tend to understand care as the domain of hospitals, community health centers, charity clinics and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), a domain wherein emotional detachment tends to be linked to professionalization. Accordingly, ever-growing scholarly attention to immigrant health disparities has been predominately concerned with questions about access to and utilization of services within this specific domain. Drawing on eleven months of ethnographic observations and thirty-six semi-structured in-depth interviews with the JyP, a non-governmental organization that provides care to hundreds of immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa each year, this chapter proposes a new thread of research that places care within the domain of migrants themselves. Building on sociological theorizations of care work, emotion, and hegemonic masculinity, this research contributes an intersectional analysis that examines what happens when gender, race, emotion, class and nation are placed at the forefront of care.

Author

• Anthony Michael Jimenez, University of Minnesota