Caring for ageing migrants in nursing homes: 'doing diversity' while 'doing death'

The proposed paper will present first results of a research project investigating how nursing homes in Switzerland deal with migrant elders who are in intensive need of care. Focusing on the end-of-life in institutional care settings, the intention is to explore the dimensions of ‘doing death’ in Swiss nursing homes when the elderly involved are of migrant background. The focus is laid on the co-construction of end of life in interactions between residents of migrant background and professional carers involved (often of migrant background themselves), and will thereby focus on processes of ‘doing diversity’ while ‘doing death’. To do so, we chose an ethnographic approach focusing on the participant observation of everyday practices of ‘doing death’ and ‘death work’ and on interviewing staff, residents and their relatives. Caring for ageing migrants at the end of their lives is studied in different types of assisted living at the end of life: The field of research was entered by studying a group specific department for residents of so-called ‘Mediterranean’ background. It was contrasted by a department stressing the individuality of each resident but including a considerable number of residents with migrant background. We are interested in how (and if at all) specific forms of ‘doing community’ within different types of departments may also lead to specific ways of ‘doing death’, which aim at a stronger embeddedness of dying trajectories in social relations of reciprocity and exchange. Furthermore, migrant ‘doing death’ is expected to be particularly negotiable since the potential diversities of symbolic reference systems and daily practices are widened. If the respective resident is limited in his/her capacities to play an active part in negotiating about ‘good care’ and ‘good dying’ – either due to language competences, which would be migrant specific, or due to degenerative diseases, which is not migrant specific – the field of negotiations will be left up to the professionals within the organization (and to the relatives, which are, however, not constantly present). Strategies of stereotyping the ‘other’ as well as driving nurses, caring aides and other professionals of migrant background into roles of ‘cultural experts’ or ‘transcultural translators’ are expected to be common in such situations. However, the task of negotiating what would be a ‘good dying’ and what measures are appropriate is always at stake in contemporary heterogeneous societies. Therefore we would argue that studying dying processes involving migrant residents is looking at paradigmatic manifestations of doing death in recent contexts of reflexive modernity.

Multiprofessional collaboration in teaching practices in all-day-schools in Switzerland

Multiprofessional collaboration in settings of extended education has been an important research topic in the past 40 years and has been discussed as a means to improve educational achievement, foster professional development, and support teachers in their everyday work. Several recent studies in multiprofessional settings found that collaboration practices often remain on a student-centered, time-limited, and superficial level of exchange, whereas higher forms of collaboration are very rare (Dizinger, Fussangel, Kasper, 2011). Furthermore there exists an obvious research gap on collaboration in Swiss all-day schools (Jutzi&Thomann, 2012). In this study we analyzed practices of multiprofessional collaboration in school-based and community-based extracurricular activities of all-day schools in Switzerland. The aim of this qualitative study of 10 all-day schools was to answer the following questions: (a) What forms of collaboration (informal/formal) are used between the different professionals? and (b) Are there different types of all-day schools with regard to distinctive and consistent types of collaboration? We conducted 18 problem-centered interviews (with the principals/heads of the all-day schools) and 10 focus group discussions (teams). In the process of data evaluation, we applied the method of qualitative content analysis. The results show that multiprofessional collabo ration is taking place in all of the all-day schools examined in the study. However, the collaborative practices differ in their level of intensity, design, and purpose.

Translocal Practices on the Tibetan Plateau: Motorised Mobility of Pastoralists and Spatial Transformations

Tibetan pastoralist communities in Amdo, the north-eastern region of the Tibetan plateau, have undergone tremendous change due to a number of state induced modernisation processes. Road infrastructure is but one development that aims to facilitate transition from subsistence to a market economy and to link remote pastoralist production into the global or regional market. This paper starts from the local perspective and examines how the expansion of road infrastructure and increased ownership of motorised vehicles has impacted on the mobility of pastoralists. It argues that motorisation and the increased availability of roads creates an interface for pastoralists through which they negotiate a newly emerging translocality. Roads are embedded into everyday movements and provide pastoralists with ways to integrate new developments into their lives.

Finding a voice - Nollywood inspired filmmaking practices in Switzerland

Under the name Nollywood a unique video film industry has developed in Nigeria in the last few decades, which now forms one of the world’s biggest entertainment industries. With its focus on stories reflecting „the values, desires and fears” (Haynes 2007: 133) of African viewers and its particular way of production, Nollywood brings „lived practices and its representation together in ways that make the films deeply accessible and entirely familiar to their audience“ (Marston et al. 2007: 57). In doing so, Nollywood shows its spectators new postcolonial forms of performative self‐expression and becomes a point of reference for a wide range of people. However, Nollywood not only excites a large number of viewers inside and outside Nigeria, it also inspires some of them to become active themselves and make their own films. This effect of Nigerian filmmaking can be found in many parts of sub‐Saharan Africa as well as in African diasporas all over the world – including Switzerland (Mooser 2011: 63‐66). As a source of inspiration, Nollywood and its unconventional ways of filmmaking offer African migrants a benchmark that meets their wish to express themselves as minority group in a foreign country. As Appadurai (1996: 53), Ginsburg (2003: 78) and Marks (2000: 21) assume, filmmakers with a migratory background have a specific need to express themselves through media. As minority group members in their country of residence they not only wish to reflect upon their situation within the diaspora and illustrate their everyday struggles as foreigners, but to also express their own views and ideas in order to challenge dominant public opinion (Ginsburg 2003: 78). They attempt to “talk back to the structures of power” (2003: 78) they live in. In this process, their audio-visual works become a means of response and “an answering echo to a previous presentation or representation” (Mitchell 1994: 421). The American art historian Mitchell, therefore, suggests interpreting representation as “the relay mechanism in exchange of power, value, and publicity” (1994: 420). This desire of interacting with the local public has also been expressed during a film project of African, mainly Nigerian, first-generation migrants in Switzerland I am currently partnering in. Several cast and crew members have expressed feelings of being under-represented, even misrepresented, in the dominant Swiss media discourse. In order to create a form of exchange and give themselves a voice, they consequently produce a Nollywood inspired film and wish to present it to the society they live in. My partnership in this on‐going film production (which forms the foundation of my PhD field study) allows me to observe and experience this process. By employing qualitative media anthropological methods and in particular Performance Ethnography, I seek to find out more about the ways African migrants represent themselves as a community through audio‐visual media and the effect the transnational use of Nollywood has on their form of self‐representations as well as the ways they express themselves.