In the context of the European Union, migration-related issues have become of paramount importance in recent years for governmental activity, raising the need to study, categorize and support migrant populations and to foster their integration. In order to create and expand a social care network responsible for monitoring and managing immigrants, funding has been made available, and impressive efforts have been made at both national and supra-national levels in policy development and programmes implementation. These programmes, in our perspective, revolve around what we will call the vulnerability/risk dichotomy. On the one hand, there is a representation which often links immigrants with deviance, social insecurity, social inability, and criminality, thus constituting a risk for society. On the other hand, they are also conceived as being in trouble, victims of a traumatic displacement, needy and unprotected, in a permanent state of vulnerability. This dichotomy constructs the idea that there is something inherently 'problematic' about being a migrant, thus requiring solutions to control 'risk behaviours' and to look after 'vulnerable conditions'. The main goal of the project is thus, rather than taking for granted vulnerability and risk as a natural condition in migration, to provide a critical inquiry into the social care sector targeting migrants and promoting their integration in contemporary Portugal, providing a much needed assessment of these interventions, and witnessing - through an ethnographic analysis of several specific contexts - how these policies work in practice and how they affect migrants populations. The project will investigate how these interventions aim at building mainstream forms of citizenship and personhood, commonly resting on unexpressed ethnocentric and culture-specific moral assumptions. Consequently, we intend to document and assess the institutional, social, and cultural violence migrants have to face when the social sector interven...

T-SHaRE project intends to improve the organization  of health services to make them more accessible to migrants, to improve  the relation and communication between health professionals, cultural mediators and immigrant Communities, to enhance the migrant's values and  approaches, their knowledge and competences related to health and health care. That means to define, enhance and recognize the expertise of cultural mediation in the health care sector in order to remove forms of exclusion, rejection or misunderstanding that often occur in health services, when the users have  a  hard  time  orienting  themselves  in  a system of signs, interpretations, procedures and interventions that are often distant or disrespectful of their condition and culture.  In particular, today functions and responsibilities of the cultural mediator  in the area of health care are not clearly defined or shared in the Member State and at the European level. This often creates misunderstandings with health care providers and physicians, which affect the intervention. This emerges  particularly  in the complex and delicate area of migrant women's health and mental health, where the health dimension is closely related with the social, cultural, relational, legal and economic dimension:  migrant  women  have  an  higher    index  of neonatal mortality and preterm / low weight births; migrants with psychiatric needs find often difficulties to access to  and to receive psychiatric treatment. Furthermore, immigrants in the EU territory are not  only  users  of  health  services,  but sometimes they have and bring to Europe knowledge, practices, cultural representations of illness and health, medical practices, help relationships, which potentially represent an opportunity for innovation and improvement of European health models for all European citizens. T-SHaRE will then bring out different visions and practices in the field of health and care, with a view to make them talk. The main aims of the...

Vulnerability is a characteristic which is socially recognized as being common in migrant communities. Health problems are exacerbated by poor integration into the general community, social and economic levels that are below the average in the country of residence, cultural and linguistic barriers, etc. Though these factors have long been recognized, and a number of campaigns have taken place to improve awareness of the risks of infectious diseases (such as TB, hepatitis and AIDS) among this population, there has been in Portugal, up to the present, no anthropological reflection with any degree of depth on this process of encounter between different kinds of knowledge and practice of cure, linked to specific historical and cultural contexts, nor a thorough analysis of the opportunities and risks which stem from medical pluralism. The need for this reflection on migrant's pathways to care is particularly felt in na area such as Lisbon, whose urban space is also a space where autonomous logics and worlds coexist, a field of dramatic change, of deep social contrast and power struggles, of new identity dynamics, of unpredictable shades of individual subjectivity. On the one hand, health care providers are confronted by such a sharp gradient of cultural otherness that a real risk arises of inadequacy and even inability to apply routine processes of clinical intervention; at the very least, their effectiveness is strongly reduced. On the other hand, in many cases migrants lose their bearings when confronted with a biomedical "morality" - defining risk, disease, health and cure, and conditioning the perception and representation of the body - that, for them, does not make any sense. When they demand na explanation, the inadequacy of the biomedical interpretations is felt with acute discomfort by the migrants. The research project we propose to undertake finds the main objectives of its reflection in the suffering, the emotions and the discontent of migrants: it is in those...