Elizabeth L. Krause

Introduction. Ethnography and biopolitics: tracing ‘rationalities’ of reproduction across the north–south divide

This collection of papers assembles the work of international ethnographers plying their painstaking methods in different nooks of the world. Their projects collectively confront tyrannies with truths. Such endeavors are not easily accomplished, for the truth about reproductive politics that these papers expose has largely lingered in the shadows of family planning and its rationalist paradigm. This special issue reveals how rationalities concerned with reproductive and sexual bodies arise and circulate over historic time and across social spaces. Despite wildly different contexts, remarkable similarities crosscut the ‘global North’ and ‘global South’. The papers draw attention to the ways in which policies and practices differ in their specifics yet also unpredictably mirror one another in general ways. As these biopolitical rationalities change over time, new tactics, truths, and moral regimes emerge. In parallel, they transform subjectivities and foment strategies of negotiation, contestation, and resistance. To offer intellectual glue, this introduction has three objectives: (1) to situate these papers in the context of biopolitics and clarify what has become a somewhat catch-all, hazy concept; (2) to specify the relevance of ethnography for enacting a ‘genealogical method’ in order to question assumptions about rational reproduction; and (3) to illuminate themes that emerge in an epistemic moment in which neoliberal ideologies of privatization and other forces of globalization influence social spaces in the ‘global North’ and ‘South’. One of the most salient global shifts in the past decades stems from trends of declining fertility. Population policies targeted at reducing births have waned. Given that those policies were promoted in the guise of modernity, development, and linear notions of progress (Greenhalgh 1995), one might imagine that debates over reproductive practices would have largely vanished. Instead, the tired neo-Malthusian key has shifted to a neoliberal register in which reproductive politics aim at defending, granting, and enhancing individual or collective rights

Ho un luogo dove lavoro e un luogo dove abito. Diversità e separazione in un distretto industriale in transizione

L’articolo analizza alcuni aspetti legati alla presenza di famiglie di lavoratori migranti provenienti dalla provincia cinese dello Zhejiang nel distretto industriale di Prato. La ricerca etnografica condotta dagli autori evidenzia la centralita delle famiglie cinesi nelle recenti dinamiche della globalizzazione del settore manifatturiero del pronto moda e mostra come le risorse attivate dai meccanismi della reciprocita siano centrali nel sostenere la competitivita e la flessibilita del sistema produttivo locale. Gli autori esplorano alcune pratiche, ambiti e situazioni della vita urbana, come le pratiche di gestione del tempo e della prole da parte delle famiglie, che, specie tra i nuclei meno abbienti, prevedono l’affidamento dei bambini per lunghi periodi ai nonni o ai parenti che vivono in Cina. Un altro ambito di analisi sono le politiche restrittive e discriminatorie adottate dall’amministrazione comunale circa l’utilizzo dello spazio pubblico nelle zone urbane a maggiore insediamento dei migranti.

Bridging graduate education in public health and the liberal arts.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst is part of Five-Colleges Inc, a consortium that includes the university and four liberal arts colleges. Consortium faculty from the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the university and from the colleges are working to bridge liberal arts with public health graduate education. We outline four key themes guiding this effort and exemplary curricular tools for innovative community-based and multidisciplinary academic and research programs. The structure of the consortium has created a novel trajectory for student learning and engagement, with important ramifications for pedagogy and professional practice in public health. We show how graduate public health education and liberal arts can, and must, work in tandem to transform public health practice in the 21st century.

Memory and meaning: genealogy of a fertile protest

Abstract This essay parses ethnographic and historical research on the political economy of generational and reproductive change. It aims to grasp experiences and transformations related to Italys ‘lowest-low’ fertility, a situation that demographers and policymakers view as dangerous. This paper offers a counter-narrative as it asks: ‘What do subjugated memories and everyday practices reveal about Italys demographic “decline”?’ Studies of Europes demographic transition – one of the most famous yet quiet revolutions of modern times – have largely ignored an examination of transformation through the lens of memory. Using a social – genealogical methodology to merge subjugated and erudite knowledges, I draw on local memories that may upset the ‘tyranny’ of globalizing discourses. Memories from central Italy reveal a history of hidden traumas and dislocations involving a complex and hidden economy of weavers and wetnurses that are all but forgotten in expert diagnoses of the nation-states demographic status.

Bodies as Evidence: Mapping New Terrain for Teen Pregnancy and Parenting

ABSTRACT Predominant approaches to teen pregnancy focus on decreasing numbers of teen mothers, babies born to them, and state dollars spent to support their families. This overshadows the structural violence interwoven into daily existence for these young parents. This paper argues for the increased use of participatory visual methods to compliment traditional research methods in shifting notions of what counts as evidence in response to teen pregnancy and parenting. We present the methods and results from a body mapping workshop as part of ‘Hear Our Stories: Diasporic Youth for Sexual Rights and Justice’, a project that examines structural barriers faced by young parenting Latinas and seeks to develop relevant messaging and programming to support and engage youth. Body mapping, as an engaging, innovative participatory visual methodology, involves young parenting women and other marginalised populations in drawing out a deeper understanding of sexual health inequities. Our findings highlight the ways body mapping elicits bodies as evidence to understand young motherhood and wellbeing.

Reproduction in Retrospective, or What’s All the Fuss Over Low Fertility?

This paper offers a retrospective look at reproductive politics centered on lowest-low fertility in Europe. Drawing on Italy as a case study, the author sorts out the conundrum of national concerns about fertility decline in light of global concerns about overpopulation. Ethnographic and archival research in central Italy during the past two decades provide material to argue that dire warnings constitutes a form of demographic nationalism. The author offers a critical deployment of ethnographic methods to counter a stubborn rationalist paradigm, which underwrites family planning despite evidence to the contrary. Small families have given rise to a culture of responsibility that dictates an intense set of expectations for Italian parents. Finally, the essay reminds how reproductive matters have histories, which intersect with dominant ideologies of class, race, and gender in profound ways. At the same time, changes in population structures result in new disparities and needs for new ways to contend with the present and imagine the future.

Circulating Children, Underwriting Capitalism: Chinese Global Households and Fast Fashion in Italy

This paper analyzes how kin-related values, norms, and practices become entangled in the hegemony of global supply chains. Our collaboration focuses on the Made in Italy fast fashion sector, where the ultimate flexible workers are Chinese migrants. We home in on a paradox: half of the births in this Italian textile city are to foreign women, yet once weaned many of these babies are then sent to China. This circulation of children gives rise to a host of new discourses and interventions on parenting from various institutions and experts. We develop and use an encounter ethnography framework to contrast the expert views of childhood circulation with those of immigrant parents. We argue that global households underwrite capitalism through noncapitalist elements that are integral to the economic organization that fast fashion requires. Parents find value in circulating children in its power to activate systems of reciprocity across kin, to create networked bodies across territories, to secure affective bonds across generations, and to free up time so as to enhance their ability to work and make money.

‘You have to start with something’: towards an ethnographic research agenda for modern Italy

I accepted with much humility and some trepidation an invitation to participate in the roundtable event in New York City to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. I was spending the year far away from the East Coast, in the big sky country of the Southwest. I had not been to the City for nearly two decades. My unfamiliarity with this urban space – a quintessential symbol of global capital in the modern era – left me lacking the desire, motivation, and courage to step foot there, particularly since 9/11. I was more comfortable in Rome or Florence. As it turned out, my hotel was several grimy blocks from the tourist-imbibed Times Square, with its dizzying digital billboards and live web cams. My destination was the Casa Italiana on a handsome tree-lined street of Greenwich Village. Experienced New Yorkers will immediately know that 20 minutes would have been ample travel time between 46th and 12th streets, but I set out two hours before the event just in case I got lost or had to dodge a police barricade. Much to my amazement, I did not take the wrong train and end up in the Upper West Side. I did arrive a full hour and a half ahead of schedule, surprising the gracious staff of the Casa Italiana. I excused myself for my time-related faux pas and found my way to the cozy auditorium tucked in the basement level. Relieved that I had successfully located my final destination, and humbled that my provincialism had been exposed, I set out to get myself a hot tea. Outside, the wind ripped through the city. Hip-looking NYU students huddled together as though planning their next play. I used my peripheral vision to spot a corner market, where I purchased an overpriced self-service beverage, then found refuge back in the last row of the Casa’s auditorium. I sipped my hot tea and watched staff prepare the stage for the roundtable. By 6 o’clock, close to 100 people had filed in, mingled with friends, and found comfort in the plush theater seats. Journal editors David Kertzer and John Davis greeted the participants, doling out gifts of the latest issue of the journal with its distinctive red, white and green sidebar logo, which appears like an iconic flag above the Routledge tag. Our host, Ruth Ben-Ghiat of NYU, kicked off the event. Distinguished scholars of modern Italy offered views of the nation’s continuing promise as an ideal research site for grasping any number of modern Journal of Modern Italian Studies 11(3) 2006: 393 – 403