Daily Archives: November 18, 2021

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LIFE Summer Fellowship Reflections: Crossing the Cultural Divide: Healthcare Access for African Migrants in Northern and Southern Italy

This is the third blog post in a series written by the 2021 recipients of the Duke University Libraries Summer Research Fellowship for LIFE Students. Isaiah Mason is a senior majoring in International Comparative Studies, with a concentration in Europe. You can find the other posts here and here.

Within the past ten years, the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean Sea has become a hot button issue and site of humanitarian efforts. Connected with the events of the Arab spring, there has been significantly increased movement of migrants and refugees into Europe. In the relatively short time since its unification in 1861, Italy has transformed from a country of emigration to one of immigration, partially due to its status as a primary port of entry into Europe. Due to this, Italy becomes a place where a lot of African migrants come for varying amounts of time seeking aid. This is in addition to other migrants flows from Africa that became a subject of political focus in the early 1990s concerning the legal status of foreigners within Italy. Additionally, Italy’s colonial history within the Horn of Africa might serve to complicate African migrant access to resources and community formation, impacting the ways that they navigate life within a new country.

Another consideration that I had was the impact of location within Italy as affecting the situation of migrants. There is a strong culture within Italy of identifying with the region where one is born which compounds with distinctions between the Northern and Southern economies. As the North has a more significant history with industrialization than do many regions of the South, the presence of certain labor and manufacturing jobs creates push for Northern migration flows. In considering the displacement of migrant communities within Italy following arrival, I thought that migratory pressures might have an influence on understanding African migrant life, integration, and access to Italian society.

My project investigates the sociocultural access to Italy for African migrants, specifically the degree of healthcare access within Northern and Southern Italy to understand the presence of structural barriers and facilitators that impact the quality of care. After considering how access to healthcare could look different across Italy due to economic differences between rural and urban regions, I decided to try to include migrants from regions across Northern and Southern Italy to be able to compare their relative experiences with both aspects of building and maintaining community as well as experiences with the healthcare system. To accomplish this, I organized an ethnographic approach to interview migrants and reflect on their personal accounts within family units. Since there was a university travel ban in place, I had to shift my methodology to accommodate remote research so that I would complete the interviews over Zoom.

This project synthesizes my interests in public health with my studies of Italian language and culture throughout my time at Duke. Additionally, I chose Italy as a site of study because of the interplay between regionalism and the public healthcare system. In Italy, there is a national health service, known as the Servizio Sanitario Nazionale (SSN), that is administered on a regional basis. Italy is also divided into 20 different regions, which creates health systems with various levels of development. The SSN is also a relatively new development, having only been created in 1978. Considering the vulnerability of minorities within a public discourse would also allow me to critique the effectiveness of national policies to serve all the constituents within Italy and possibly identity areas for recourse to improve health services. Beyond the interest in healthcare, I wanted to understand Italy from the context of functioning as a space within several types of borders. Moving from the context of the nation, I was interested in determining whether region mattered in the sense of how African migrants can establish community, both in terms of family unification and preserving cultural ties with their country of origin.

Through the Duke University Libraries LIFE Undergraduate Research Grant, I set out to understand the extent of medical literature in Italy that would allow me to investigate the intersection of policy and identity for African migrants. This led first to understanding the significance of space on the degree of treatment disparities and the interesting fact that each region governs a separate healthcare system and that migrant health investigations at the national level would require comparisons of the data available in government documents and journal articles. In this process, I discovered the dominant narrative was Italian citizens that offered their analysis of the cause for various disparities concentrated in the healthcare sector.

Diving into this topic led me to new bodies of knowledge and consideration of different kinds of resources that I have not engaged with through my classes. Looking specifically into Italian government documents led me to investigate the role of language in governing access in reference to Italian citizens. Thus, the Italian government implicated legal status across time as an important consideration, meaning that the importance of holding papers becomes a strictly migrant experience that is related to phenotype. Italian comes to mean white, while the question of identity for anyone that does not fit that scope becomes a question of legitimacy.

While I reflect on some of the pitfalls of my research, namely the difficulty that I had in establishing contact with African migrants in Italy due to COVID, I think about the ways that this presented new opportunities to re-center my research on the relationship between the African migrant and Italy through labor. This research experience has caused me to go outside my comfort zone and explore different methods to appropriately write within the discourse. I would encourage anyone that has a similar interest to not count themselves out of conducting research because it is new. Before engaging with this project, I had always considered that research not directly linked to a class was not something that I saw myself doing, but this project helped me grow and seek out resources at Duke to receive guidance. As I move forward with this project throughout the following year for my honors thesis, I am excited to see what else I will be able to discover and the journey that it will take me on.

I would like to thank the Duke Libraries for the support in starting to work through key aspects of my project and providing funding to allow me to do my research during the summer. I am grateful to my faculty mentor, Professor Roberto Dainotto, and Duke Librarians Hannah Rozear and Arianne Hartsell-Gundy for the continuous support and helping me generate alternatives, without which this project would not be possible. I look forward to continuing my research on the place and agency of African migrants within Italy and building upon this work.

 

 

Announcement, diversity, Rubenstein Library

“Leonard: Political Prisoner” Wins 2021 Human Rights Audio Documentary Award

Post by Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist, and Caitlin Margaret Kelly, Curator Archive of Documentary Arts

A podcast about a Native American activist convicted of a double-murder he might not have committed is the winner of the 2021 Human Rights Audio Documentary Award sponsored by Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Leonard: Political Prisoner tells the story of Leonard Peltier, who in 1977 was sentenced to consecutive life sentences for killing two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Through a mix of archival audio, interviews, and narration, the podcast revisits the facts and irregularities of the case against Peltier, who has spent the last 44 years in federal prison. Told in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the world-wide calls for racial justice it inspired, Peltier’s account of his mistreatment at the hands of the U.S. government and American legal system takes on a new light.

Leonard: Political Prisoner was produced and hosted by Rory Owen Delaney and Andrew Fuller of Man Bites Dog Films, with Kevin McKiernan serving as consulting producer.

Responding to news of the award, the producers said, “When we set out to create this documentary podcast series, the ultimate goal was to create the quintessential, permanent, spoken-word account of the case of Leonard Peltier within the historical context of the ongoing fight that Native Americans have and continue to endure in the United States today. The preservation and access that Duke University’s Rubenstein Library will provide is an essential resource in keeping this audio time-capsule for generations to come, so that the human rights issues of indigenous peoples are never forgotten.”

Leonard is more than a true crime podcast. It deploys the language of audio storytelling to indict centuries of broken treaties, stolen land, and a racist legal system that denies Native Americans their legal and human rights. The podcast foregrounds Native American voices and follows them down related storylines, like how Mount Rushmore is perceived as an insult and desecration of the Lakota Black Hills, or how the Custer Courthouse Riot of 1973 was led by activists of the American Indian Movement. Delaney and Fuller create a rich archival world of contemporary and archived interviews, news footage, and other sonic artifacts that goes beyond the question of Peltier’s guilt and asks listeners to consider the broader crimes against humanity committed against Native Americans.

The theme of this year’s inaugural Human Rights Audio Award was language and human rights. Leonard engages language as part of their storytelling strategy. For example, Delaney and Fuller discuss why they opted to use the term “Indian” versus Native American.  They also review the history of tribal names such as the Sioux, explaining how such names can be used to foster a sense of self-identity or as a tool of repression. Peltier, through the voice of actor Peter Coyote, explains how as a child at an Indian Boarding School he was forbidden from speaking his own language, “You could say that the first infraction in my criminal career was speaking my own language, there’s an act of violence for you.” Weaving together historical research, oral histories, and contemporary voices, Leonard utilizes the strengths of the podcast medium to present complex histories and their aftermath.

The Human Rights Audio Documentary Award is sponsored by the Human Rights Archive and the Archive of Documentary Arts at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The award seeks to support outstanding documentary artists exploring human rights and social justice and expand the audio holdings in the Archive for long-term preservation and access. Winners receive $2,500 and are invited to present their work at Duke University, where a team of archivists will preserve their work.

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Library has a strong commitment to human rights and the documentary arts through collecting and making available works by creators from around the world. Its collections document the impact that organizations and individuals have to motivate the thinking of others and influence private and government policies.