Mobility Regimes in Practice: Later-life Westerners and Visa Runs in South-East Asia

Abstract

Studies of Western migrants in South-East Asia emphasise the importance of privilege, work and location within national boundaries in the construction of contemporary subjectivities. This article examines the role and relevance of cross-border mobility through the eyes of older, Western ‘visa runners’ with limited financial resources. Drawing on migrant experience of dwelling in and moving through Penang, Malaysia, I address the ways in which the mobility regimes of immigration frameworks and visa regulations become a formative aspect or otherwise of social practice and belonging. In focusing on the personal and social experience of visa running, this article transcends a methodological nationalist focus on identities and subjectivities within national spaces and highlights the variable role of people, places and life history in the forming of multi-layered attachments across national spaces in South-East Asia.     

Journeys to Knua: displacement,return and translocality in Timor-Leste

ABSTRACT

Return journeys to ancestral lands are a central dimension that underscores contemporary ideas of origin, identity, kinship, custom, health and prosperity for the East Timorese. The material and social reproduction of knua – both in the sense of the ancestral territory and associated kin-based ritual community – is heavily reliant on ongoing place-based and translocal customary reciprocal exchanges. Based on multi-sited fieldwork, this article examines the return journeys to Lesuai, an ancestral settlement in the remote central southern highlands of Timor-Leste, which was abandoned during the Indonesian invasion and restored in the later years of occupation. Lesuai community believes the spirit realm exerts an overwhelming influence over their general well-being, compelling ‘house’ members to renew their connection with knua to maintain family ties and benefit from ancestral protection. Closer ethnographic attention reveals how the motivations, experiences and understandings of ‘return’ to origin places are highly personal, gendered and generational. Broadly, these return mobilities demonstrate the agency, adaptability and resilience of conflict-affected populations. Through prolonged displacement and resettlement, dispersed knua members have created new livelihoods, subjectivities and attachments across multiple places, which are reconfiguring family ties, connections to ancestral places, and how ritual obligations are fulfilled.     

Taking Sacred Space out of Place: From Mount Sinai to Mount Getty Through Travelling Icons

Abstract

Starting from a behind‐the‐scenes tour preceding the opening of the recent Getty exhibition Icons from Sinai, this article seeks to destabilize traditional notions of sacred space as a territorially fixed entity defined through a binary opposition to the profane. Icons and other ‘travelling’ sacred objects are regarded as vehicles for the circulation and displacement of holy places outside of their physical boundaries and for the reconfiguration of sacred space in new, hybrid forms. The paper thus suggests a reconceptualization of sacred space in relational terms, as the product of human and non‐human interactions and networked flows, and of ‘sacred places’ as ‘reassuring anchors’ (both territorial and imaginative) within a world of fluid global networks.     

Reproductive vibes: therapeutic atmospheres and the reproductive force of tourism mobilities

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a conceptual framework of therapeutic atmospheres, I explore the question of how a tourist destination reverberated with reproductive potentiality or a ‘reproductive vibe.’ I draw on ethnographic fieldwork attentive to the ‘charged atmosphere of everyday life’, to consider how reproductive possibilities unfolded in the Costa Rican Caribbean for some tourist women. Moving away from the autonomous, liberal, mobile subject as only ever a rational agent in reproductive decision-making, this article introduces new actors into the analytical and empirical framework of reproductive mobilities and cross-border reproductive care. I look at destination branding entangled with therapeutic ‘life affirming’ possibilities that emanated from local spaces and relations with the environment. In doing so, I trouble the irrational/rationality binary that dominates notions of reproductive decision-making to consider the role of affect, feelings, and bodies in reproductive subjectivities.     

Slowing Down Mobilities: Passengering on an Inter-war Ocean Liner

Abstract

This article contributes to recent work on the figure of the passenger and ‘passengering’ in mobilities research. It does so by considering the experiences of one passenger over two journeys on an ocean liner undertaken in 1930. The article ‘follows’ the passenger over the course of the two journeys in order to open up the processuality of passengering. The article makes two core contributions. First, it demonstrates the need to lend attention to the specific socialities and materialities of mobile modalities that work on and form the passenger. It is shown how specific assemblages come together at sea to create atmospheres that shape the experiences of long-distance travel over water. Second, by following the passenger over the course of journeying, it demonstrates the emergence of the passenger in relation to shifting affective atmospheres, not as a static figure but one of becoming passenger, as a shifting set of subjectivities, and, in turn, shows the value of ‘following’ a journey within mobilities research.     

Midwifery-led care in South Australia: Looking back to move forward

BackgroundFrom the 1980s to the turn of the century, Australia saw an evolution of midwifery-led models of care, in part due to legislative reform and federal funding, but largely owing to the efforts of strong midwifery leaders and consumers who rallied for the implementation of alternative models of care. Through persistence and extensive collaboration, the first South Australian birth centres were established.AimTo better understand the evolution of midwifery-led care in South Australia and identify the drivers and impediments to inform the upscaling of midwifery models into the future.MethodsSemi-structured interviews were conducted with ten midwifery leaders and/or those instrumental in setting up birth centres and midwifery-led care in South Australia. Data was analysed using thematic analysis.FindingsThree overarching themes and several sub-themes were identified, these included: ‘Midwifery suffragettes’ which explored ‘activism’, ‘adversity’ and ‘advocacy’; ‘Building bridges’ captured the importance of ‘gathering midwives’, a ‘movement of women’ and ‘champions and influencers’; and ‘Recognising midwifery’ identified the strong ‘sense of identity’ needed to outface ‘ignorance and opposition’ and the importance of ‘role reformation’.ConclusionThese midwifery leaders provide insight into an era of change in the history of midwifery in South Australia and contribute valuable learnings. In order to move forward, midwives must continue to embrace the political nature of midwifery, enact authentic, transformational leadership and engage women across all levels of influence. It is critical that midwives pursue equity in professional recognition, work collaboratively to provide quality, woman-centred maternity care and expand midwifery continuity of care models.     

When People Stay and Things Make Their Way: Airports,Mobilities and Materialities of a Transnational Landscape

Abstract

This article explores different meanings of mobility and place by examining the interweaving of people, things and airports in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two airports – of departure and arrival of this migratory route – I look at the practices of sending and receiving objects by migrants in Lisbon and their kin in Bissau. The transnational yet grounded setting helps to provide a better understanding of the complexity associated with different forms of mobility – including corporeal, imagined and desired – and their key role in socially and relationally constructing a lived airport space, as well as wider social landscapes. Bringing in evidence from a less-explored setting – a small airport in a West African country – will particularly challenge some of the assumptions that tend to associate mobility with ‘modernity’ and fixity with ‘tradition’. It will show how people in Guinea-Bissau are, as much as migrants abroad, dynamically involved in global practices of movement – materialised in trading and reciprocating objects between two continents – through local performances of mobility that do not necessarily involve corporeal travel across borders.     

A New Class of Cyclists: Banham’s Bicycle and the Two-wheeled World it didn’t Create

Abstract

While not uncommon for innovator and innovation to merge into a single identity, it is more unusual for this to occur between object and critic. But it did happen in the 1960’s with a novel small-wheeled bicycle, the Moulton, and the British architecture and design critic Reyner Banham. Banham believed the Moulton would give rise to a new generation of middle-class urban radical cyclists who would eventually come to rely on bicycles for their transport needs. While this did not happen, the Moulton’s attention-getting technology did lead to a revived market in for bicycles among young, newly affluent consumers who bought small-wheeled utility bicycles as fashion statements and status symbols.     

Unlikely hikers? Activism,Instagram, and the queer mobilities of fat hikers,women hiking alone,and hikers of colour

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates a nascent, primarily online community of so-called ‘unlikely hikers’, united in the premise that hiking is good for everyone’s mental and physical health and that diversity can and should extend to outdoor spaces including national parks. However, the ways in which hikers have hitherto been represented in outdoors media, advertising, and wider social imaginaries present potent barriers to participation. The paper traces the discursive origins and positioned ideologies of ‘the outdoors’ in former British settler colonies, particularly the USA, showing how national parks maintain legacies of frontier colonialism and default understandings of legitimate outdoorspeople as necessarily White, able-bodied, straight, and male. These legacies are then traced through four years of online ethnographic data (2015–2018), comprising multimedia narratives of fat hikers, solo women hikers including lesbian women, and hikers of colour as they relate their outdoor experiences on Instagram and related podcasts, blogs, and magazine articles. The discussion is theorized using Holman Jones and Harris’s notion of queering and Urry’s mobilities paradigm, and ‘queer mobilities’ is proposed as part of an activism and amplification aimed at queering the trail both within and beyond academic spaces.     

Red flags for episiotomy in a midwife-led birth: Using co-production with midwives to capture clinical experience

BackgroundOne of four key points in the Obstetric Anal Sphincter Injury Care Bundle, first piloted in the UK in 2016, was the directive to perform episiotomy when clinically indicated. Midwives are the primary health care professional for straightforward births in the UK and there is very little published literature that relates to their practice in this area.AimThe aim of the study was to explore experienced midwives’ decision-making processes in their assessments for episiotomy during birth.Methods43 midwives self-identifying as confident in performing episiotomy were sampled across 8 NHS Trusts in England and Wales. Data collection was via online focus groups and 1:1 interviews. Primary thematic analysis was undertaken by the research team. Preliminary themes were used to structure a co-production analysis workshop where eight experienced midwives undertook a secondary analysis of the data resulting in four overall themes.FindingsFour themes were identified, ‘Optimising Perineal Function’, ‘Red Flags to Stimulate Decision-Making’, ‘The Midwives’ Episiotomy’ and ‘Infiltration as a Catalyst for Birth’.DiscussionMidwives use a number of visual, auditory and touch cues to inform their assessments for episiotomy during birth.ConclusionThis study provides valuable insight into the cues that guide experienced midwives’ decision-making in relation to episiotomy and contributes evidence related to performing episiotomy when clinically indicated in spontaneous vaginal birth.     

Questionably Queer: Understanding Straight Presence in the Post-Gay Bar

ABSTRACT

Gay bars have long been understood as havens from heteronormativity. However, a shift towards greater LGBTQ tolerance has led to more heterosexual involvement in these once marginal places. Such shifts towards ‘post-gay’ identity politics have called into question the queerness of many LGBTQ-oriented social outlets. This paper illustrates how rhetorical marketing and aesthetic choices lead some venues to develop reputations as questionably queer spaces—reputations that are created and negotiated by patrons as they evaluate these venues’ ultimate functionality in relation to their own increasingly uncertain ideals about the form and desirability of queer spaces. By examining how divergent configurations of queerness mediate the ambivalence many LGBTQ people feel about these places and the straight people who occupy them, we can further our knowledge about how queer space operates today without getting trapped within the homonormative/queer dichotomy that limits much pre-existing research.     

Antenatal asthma management by midwives in Australia — Self-reported knowledge,confidence and guideline use

BackgroundAsthma affects approximately 12.7% of pregnant women in Australia. Increased maternal and infant morbidity is closely associated with poorly controlled asthma during pregnancy. Midwives are well placed to provide antenatal asthma management but data on current asthma management during pregnancy is not available, nor is the use of guidelines for clinical practice by this health professional group.AimTo explore self-reported antenatal asthma management provided by midwives across Australia and how this reflects guideline recommendations.MethodAn online survey was developed and distributed throughout Australia via the Australian College of Midwives, social media and healthcare facilities.ResultsResponses from 371 midwives were obtained. Ten percent of midwives rated their knowledge as ‘good’ and 1% as ‘very good’, with 39% ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’. Being ‘somewhat’ or ‘not at all’ confident to provide antenatal asthma management was noted by 87% of midwives. Clinical guidelines were referred to by 50% of midwives and 40% stated that their main role was to refer women to other healthcare professionals. Only 54% reported that a clear referral pathway existed. Most respondents (>90%) recognised key recommendations for asthma management such as smoking cessation, appropriate vaccinations, and the continuation of prescribed asthma medications.ConclusionAlthough midwives appear aware of key clinical recommendations for optimal antenatal asthma management, low referral to clinical practice guidelines and lack of knowledge and confidence was evident. Further research is required to determine what care pregnant women with asthma are actually receiving and identify strategies to improve antenatal asthma management by midwives.     

Fortress Europe’s far-flung borderlands: ‘Illegality’ and the ‘deportation regime’ in France’s Caribbean and Indian Ocean territories

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the French overseas territories of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, which are also European ‘outermost regions,’ make up the first borders of ‘Fortress Europe,’ geographically, historically and legislatively. Since the 1980s, a set of laws, described as ‘laws of exception,’ place the majority of the foreign residents in a state of ‘illegality.’ These overseas territories are in the vanguard of a French ‘regime of deportation’ that targets foreign nationals, indigenous populations and former colonial subjects. They are places of experimentation for legal exceptions, which are then implemented in metropolitan France. This paper will analyze how the reinforcement of borders contradicts the popular and scholarly representation of the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean as sites of mobility.     

Towards a conceptualisation of woman centred care — A global review of professional standards

BackgroundWoman centred care is purported to underpin Midwifery philosophy. However, the evidence and focus of this concept within midwifery professional standards has yet to be verified. Further to this, woman centred care is, at this time, mostly depicted as a way of assisting, supporting and interacting with a woman and her family. It is however, without a substantive universally accepted definition.ObjectiveThis study aimed to review midwifery standards documents. An organised and targeted methodology was conducted to identify the approaches to woman centred care that currently underpin midwifery governance.MethodsA comprehensive and specific search for ‘woman centred care’ was conducted across a global collection of midwifery standards. A professional document was included if it represented either or all of the underpinnings of midwifery education, contained statements related to standards of practice, overall governance or any equivalence. Individual documents were initially searched for the words ‘woman centred care’, followed by ‘women centred care’, ‘patient/person centred care’ and ‘client centred care’.FindingsAn extensive review of 142 documents was undertaken. These included: thirty independent nations, thirty represented by the European Midwives Association and a further twenty-one identified through the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM). The World Health Organisation (WHO), yielded midwifery information from a further sixty-one nations. The phrase ‘woman centred care’ was located within 3.5% of the documents reviewed. Overall, five examples were found that directly referred to the actual phrase ‘woman centred care’ and one to the use of ‘person centred care’. Therefore, it was established, that at the time of this review, there was limited formal depiction of the concept of woman centred care.     

Carers Cruising Cumbria and Meals on the Mile: The Drive of Migrants in Fieldwork and Fiction

Abstract

This article focuses on first-generation migrant workers in the service sector of England’s North West and their mobile subjectivities. It combines the research on cars and driving with the mobilities agenda on transnational migrants. In this essay, we draw from both fiction and fieldwork to explore the mobile experiences of migrants who work within the region’s ‘service diaspora’. Two inter-related stories unfold about cars, care and curry. Both groups, one in a city-region, and the other rurally based, are defined heavily by their mobile labour. By placing literary and oral accounts together, disparate locations and situations suddenly appear connected as never before and driving becomes embedded in migrant worlds in both real and imaginary ways.     

Childbearing women’s experiences of the maternity care system in Australia during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic

BackgroundSubstantial changes occurred in Australian healthcare provision during the COVID-19 pandemic to reduce the risk of infection transmission. Little is known about the impact of these changes on childbearing women.AimTo explore and describe childbearing women’s experiences of receiving maternity care during the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia.MethodsA qualitative exploratory design using semi-structured interviews was used. Women were recruited through social media and self-nominated to participate in an interview. Maximum variation sampling was used. Twenty-seven interviews were conducted with women from across Australia. Data was analysed thematically.FindingsThree primary themes and nine sub-themes emerged: ‘navigating a changing health system’ (coping with constant change, altered access to care, dealing with physical distancing restrictions, and missing care), ‘desiring choice and control’ (experiencing poor communication, making hard decisions, and considering alternate models of care), and ‘experiencing infection prevention measures’ (minimising the risk of exposure and changing care plans to minimise infection risk).DiscussionThe substantial changes in care delivery for pregnant and postpartum women during the pandemic appear to have reduced woman-centred care. In most cases, care was perceived as impersonal and incomplete, resulting in a very different experience than expected; consequences included missing care. The presence of a known care provider improved women’s sense of communication, choice, and control.ConclusionThis study provides unique insight into the experiences of childbearing women across Australia. The importance of respectful woman-centred care cannot be forgotten during a pandemic. The findings may inform future service planning during pandemics and disaster situations.     

Walking Again Lively: Towards an Ambulant and Conversive Methodology of Performance and Research

Abstract

Narrative walking practices, or modes of conversational activity set in motion by the conditions of wayfinding, potentially offer mobile and dialogic methods of engaging with experiences of mobility and of representing those experiences. They also offer alternative ways of intervening in politics and policy impacting on the distribution of mobility or immobility. The artwork way from home employed such practices as a performative, participatory and interventional methodology for eliciting and representing the transnational experiences, affects and significances of place for refugees and asylum seekers across the UK. The various strategies conceived here as homing devices, homing tales and conversive wayfinding, were employed to construct ‘meeting places’ where transnational views, perspectives, experiences and knowledge could be exchanged. This methodology proposes alternatives to hegemonies of communication, representation and authorship in both artistic and scholarly production, through processes that interrelate experiential, analytical and interventional ways of knowing.     

‘Stories of distress versus fulfilment’: A narrative inquiry of midwives’ experiences supporting alternative birth choices in the UK National Health Service

BackgroundSome childbearing women/birthing people prioritize out of maternity care organizational guidelines’ approaches to childbirth as a way of optimizing their chances of a normal physiological birth. Currently, there is little known about the experiences of midwives who support their choices.AimTo explore the experiences of UK midwives employed by the NHS, who self-defined as supportive of women’s alternative physiological birthing choices.MethodsA narrative inquiry was used to collect and analyse professional stories of practice via self-written narratives and interviews. Forty-five midwives from across the UK were recruited.FindingsThree overarching storylines were developed with nine sub-themes. ‘Stories of distress’ highlights challenging experiences due to poor supportive working environments, ranging from small persistent challenges to extreme situations. Conversely, ‘Stories of fulfilment’ offers a positive counter-narrative where midwives worked in supportive working environments enabling woman-centred care unencumbered by organisational constraints. ‘Stories of transition’ abridge these two polarized themes.ConclusionThe midwives’ experiences were mediated by their socio-cultural working contexts. Negative experiences were characterised by a misalignment between the midwives’ philosophy and organisational cultures, with significant consequences for the midwives. Conversely, examples of good organisational culture and practice reveal that it is possible for organisations to fulfil their obligations for safe and positive maternity care for both childbearing women who make alternative birthing choices, and for attending staff. This highlights what is feasible and achievable within maternity organisations and offers transferable insights for organisational support of out-of-guideline care that can be adapted across the UK and beyond.