Navigating the Intersections of Migration and Motherhood in Online Communities: Digital Community Mothering and Migrant Maternal Imaginaries

This thesis explores the experiences of contemporary migrant mothers in Australia, through the lens of their online communities. Facebook groups created by and for migrant mothers from particular national, ethnic or linguistic communities have proliferated in the last decade. The analysis of these groups acts as a springboard to investigate how migrant mothers in Australia experience and respond to migration and motherhood, centring on four key areas: community-building and leadership; friendship and sociality; the emotions of motherhood and migration; and migrant mothers’ maternal practices, narratives and imaginaries.Literature and concepts from three distinct fields – motherhood studies, migration research and digital sociology – inform the research. Understandings of migration are extended and troubled by highlighting the importance of maternal social connection, not simply in relation to their partners and children or to the labour market, but also between mothers. The investigation of the role of migrant maternal Facebook groups in the everyday lives of migrant mothers also extends scholarship in digital sociology by bringing feminist, matricentric (A. O'Reilly 2016) and intersectional approaches into conversation with key themes relating to belonging, mobility and connection.The thesis involved a scoping exercise which mapped Australian online migrant mother’s groups, an online survey of women ‘mothering away from home’ , and semi-structured interviews with 41 migrant mothers from ten different countries living in Sydney and Melbourne, who were members of migrant mothers’ online groups. Fifteen of the interviewees held an administrator role in their group, and the digital and emotional labour involved in managing the groups became a central theme. The migrant maternal narratives elicited across the study demonstrate the role of the digital in managing the ruptures and connections of migrant motherhood. Mothers, as both consumers and producers of digital information and community, are shown to be working to effect settlement and create belonging for themselves and others.This thesis works to bring mothers out from the shadows of migration and digital social research. In order to achieve the task of making migrant mothers visible, new concepts have been introduced, such as ‘digital community mothering’, ‘relational settlement’, ‘affective settlement’ and ‘migrant maternal imagined communities’. The groups are representations of their collective maternal imaginary, as well as mechanisms for forging ‘real’ connections

Personhood, belonging, affect and affliction

What does migrancy mean for personhood, and how does this flow through caring relations? Drawing on life history interviews and photo elicitation with 43 people who identify as migrants and live with cancer, here we argue for the significance of recognising complex personhood as it inflects illness and care. Drawing on social science theory around temporalities, moralities and belonging, we assemble a series of cross-cutting themes at the intersection of personhood and care; relations that transcend cultural origins yet are vividly illustrated in relation to migrant pasts. In seeking a multidimensional view of personhood, we attend to the intersecting layers of complexity that make up care in this context vis-a-vis an emphasis on forms of difference, vulnerability and otherness. In this way, we develop an approach to personhood and care that broadens the lens on migrancy and cancer, but also, one that speaks to the importance of recognition of complexity and how it shapes care more generally

Living (well) with cancer in the precision era

Surviving cancer in the precision era of targeted drugs and immunotherapies increasingly involves surviving-with malignancy. Against this backdrop of precision, innovation and chronicity, this paper offers a person-centred examination of some of the emerging intersections of chronic living and cancer treatment. Using a temporally extended qualitative methodology drawing on solicited diaries and successive in-depth interviews with people receiving precision cancer therapies, we focus on the often opaque worlds of surviving-with cancer, day-to-day, amidst the evolving scene of therapeutic innovation. Tracing how elements of the catastrophic and the mundane are braided through these everyday experiences, we seek to provide an embodied and temporally extended account of everyday life, beyond the binaries of presence/absence of disease, or of death/cure. In so doing, we consider how the normative expectations of treatment, bodies, care and emotions are being reshaped, elevating the moral work of the precision-cancer intersection

Migrant Mothers in the Digital Age: Emotion and Belonging in Migrant Maternal Online Communities

This book explores the experiences of migrant mothers through the lens of the online communities they have created and participate in. Examining the ways in which migrant mothers build relationships with each other through these online communities and find ways to make a place for themselves and their families in a new country, it highlights the often overlooked labour that goes into sustaining these groups and facilitating these new relationships and spaces of trust. Through the concept of ‘digital community mothering,’ the author draws links to Black feminist scholarship that has shed light on the kinds of mothering that exist beyond the mother–child dyad. Providing new insights into the experiences of women who mother ‘away from home’ in this contemporary digital age, this volume explores the concepts of imagined maternal communities, personal maternal narratives, and migrant maternal imaginaries, highlighting the ways in which migrant mothers imagine themselves within local, national, and diasporic maternal communities. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students with interests in migration and diaspora studies, contemporary motherhood and the sociology of the family, and modern forms of online sociality. Winner of The Australian Sociological Association Raewyn Connell Prize for best first book published in Australian sociology, 2020-2021

Migrant mothers and the ambivalence of co-ethnicity in online communities

Since the advent of digital and mobile communication technologies, scholars have been investigating how these technologies are changing experiences of migration and mobility. In the field of gender and migration, researchers have shown how the experience of migration can change maternal practices, and alter understandings of ‘good motherhood’. These ‘digital migrant’ and ‘migrant motherhood’ literatures have intersected in studies of technologically mediated transnational mothering, in the context of mother–child separation. In contrast, this study focuses on migrant mothers in Australia who are co-located with their children. Drawing on interviews with migrant mothers from a range of migrant communities in Sydney and Melbourne, this article explores how the use of online migrant maternal communities helps women to navigate motherhood in a migrant context. Specifically, it draws attention to the ways migrant mothers use the affordances of social media to work through their complex and ambivalent feelings about their migrant maternal identities and practices, and about co-ethnic social networks. The paper foregrounds the role of the imagination and relationships in shaping migrant identities and experiences and proposes the ‘migrant maternal imaginary’ as a valuable concept for understanding migrant motherhood

Exploring the safety and quality of mobile X-ray imaging in a new infectious disease biocontainment unit: an in situ simulation and video-reflexive study

Objectives During a precommissioning inspection of a new biocontainment centre, radiographers noted structural features of quarantine rooms that could compromise staff and patient safety and the X-ray image quality, even after significant modifications had been made to an earlier radiography protocol. The aim of this study was to explore the safety and effectiveness of the modified protocol, in the new space, and identify improvements, if required.Design A qualitative study using in situ simulation and video-reflexive methods.Setting A newly built biocontainment centre, prior to its commissioning in 2021, in a large, tertiary hospital in Sydney, Australia.Participants Five radiographers, and a nurse and a physician from the biocontainment centre, consented to participate. All completed the study.Interventions Two simulated mobile X-ray examinations were conducted in the unit prior to its commissioning; simulations were videoed. Participants and other stakeholders analysed video footage, collaboratively, and sessions were audio recorded, transcribed and analysed thematically. Problems and potential solutions identified were collated and communicated to the hospital executive, for endorsement and actioning, if possible.Results Four themes were identified from the data: infection exposure risks, occupational health and exposure risks, communication and X-ray image quality. Facilitated group reviews of video footage identified several important issues, across these four areas of risk, which had not been identified previously.Conclusions In situ simulation is used, increasingly, to evaluate and improve healthcare practices. This study confirmed the added value of video-reflexive methods, which provided experienced participants with a richer view of a familiar protocol, in a new setting. Video footage can be examined immediately, or later if required, by a broader group of stakeholders, with diverse experience or expertise. Using video reflexivity, clinicians identified potential safety risks, which were collated and reported to the hospital executive, who agreed to implement modifications

Paradoxes of pandemic infection control: Proximity, pace and care within and beyond SARS-CoV-2

From the adoption of mask-wearing in public settings to the omnipresence of hand-sanitising, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has brought unprecedented cultural attention to infection prevention and control (IPC) in everyday life. At the same time, the pandemic threat has enlivened and unsettled hospital IPC processes, fracturing confidence, demanding new forms of evidence, and ultimately involving a rapid reassembling of what constitutes safe care. Here, drawing on semi-structured interviews with 63 frontline healthcare workers from two states in Australia, interviewed between September 2020 and March 2021, we illuminate some of the affective dimensions of IPC at a time of rapid change and evolving uncertainty. We track how a collective sense of risk and safety is relationally produced, redefining attitudes and practices around infective risk, and transforming accepted paradigms of care and self-protection. Drawing on Puig de la Bellacasa's formulation, we propose the notion of IPC as a multidimensional matter of care. Highlighting the complex negotiation of space and time in relation to infection control and care illustrates a series of paradoxes, the understanding of which helps illuminate not only how IPC works, in practice, but also what it means to those working on the frontline of the pandemic

Hope in the era of precision oncology: a qualitative study of informal caregivers’ experiences

Objectives To explore informal caregivers’ perspectives on precision medicine in cancer care.Design Semi-structured interviews with the informal caregivers of people living with cancer and receiving targeted/immunotherapies. Interview transcripts were analysed thematically using a framework approach.Setting Recruitment was facilitated by two hospitals and five Australian cancer community groups.Participants Informal caregivers (n=28; 16 men, 12 women; aged 18–80) of people living with cancer and receiving targeted/immunotherapies.Results Thematic analysis identified three findings, centred largely on the pervasive theme of hope in relation to precision therapies including: (1) precision as a key component of caregivers’ hope; (2) hope as a collective practice between patients, caregivers, clinicians and others, which entailed work and obligation for caregivers; and (3) hope as linked to expectations of further scientific progress, even if there may be no personal, immediate benefit.Conclusions Innovation and change in precision oncology are rapidly reconfiguring the parameters of hope for patients and caregivers, creating new and difficult relational moments and experiences in everyday life and in clinical encounters. In the context of a shifting therapeutic landscape, caregivers’ experiences illustrate the need to understand hope as collectively produced, as emotional and moral labour, and as entangled in broader cultural expectations of medical advances. Such understandings may help clinicians as they guide patients and caregivers through the complexities of diagnosis, treatment, emerging evidence and possible futures in the precision era. Developing a better understanding of informal caregivers’ experiences of caring for patients receiving precision therapies is important for improving support to patients and their caregivers