Death and the Migrant: Bodies, Borders and Care

Description

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Death and the Migrant is a sociological account of transnational dying and care in British cities. It chronicles two decades of the ageing and dying of the UK's cohort of post-war migrants, as well as more recent arrivals. Chapters of oral history and close ethnographic observation, enriched by photographs, take the reader into the submerged worlds of end-of-life care in hospices, hospitals and homes. While honouring singular lives and storytelling, Death and the Migrant explores the social, economic and cultural landscapes that surround the migrant deathbed in the twenty-first century. Here, everyday challenges - the struggle to belong, relieve pain, love well, and maintain dignity and faith - provide a fresh perspective on concerns and debates about the vulnerability of the body, transnationalism, care and hospitality. Blending narrative accounts from dying people and care professionals with insights from philosophy and feminist and critical race scholars, Yasmin Gunaratnam shows how the care of vulnerable strangers tests the substance of a community. From a radical new interpretation of the history of the contemporary hospice movement and its 'total pain' approach, to the charting of the global care chain and the affective and sensual demands of intercultural care, Gunaratnam offers a unique perspective on how migration endows and replenishes national cultures and care. Far from being a marginal concern, Death and the Migrant shows that transnational dying is very much a predicament of our time, raising questions and concerns that are relevant to all of us.

Yasmin Gunaratnam is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK. She has been working on issues of race and gender equality in health and social care for the past twenty years at the Open University, Southampton University and the University of Central Lancashire. She is author of Researching Race and Ethnicity (2003) and has jointly edited Narratives and Stories in Health Care with David Oliviere (2009).

This is a collection of extraordinary narratives about generosity and inventiveness that provides new insight into experiences of multi-cultural living, revealing shared human predicaments . . . This book will be of interest to scholars of sociology, psychology, anthropology, medicine and health, and practitioners in social work, diversity counsellors and aid organisations, among others. -- Akm Ansah Ullah, American University, Cairo * Oral History * Death and the Migrant is a quietly extraordinary book about aged immigrants who reside in hospices, hospitals and the community ... Sometimes Gunaratnam's insights and language take one's breath away ... [A] singular, almost unplaceable book that opens up cartographies, both real and imaginative, that deserve a good deal more exploration. * Wasafari * Each chapter in Death and the Migrant is an elegant and emotion fed essay, drawing on the words of dying people and of those caring for them as they try to arrive at some kind of resolution while illness progresses rapidly and abilities to communicate verbally and non verbally diminish ... This book deserves a wide readership, amongst students of death and dying, of migration, race and racism but perhaps for everyone who has contemplated how death is to be accomplished without compromising understanding of individuality in life. -- Joanna Bornat, Emeritus professor of oral history, The Open University, UK * darkmatter *