Migrant Mother Research Articles

Attachment and Self Esteem Quality of Children Aged 10-12 Years with Migrant Mother in Indonesian workers

This study aims to determine the quality of the attachment, self-esteem and influence between them in adolescents aged 10-12 years who have a mother as a migrant worker in primary schools Locondong, Banyumas. The method used in this research is the Mixed Method. The data in this study were obtained from the student questionnaire, the results of student interviews, interviews of parents and teacher interviews. Instruments in this study using the Inventory Of Parents and Peer Attachment and Coopersmith Self-esteem Inventory (CSEI), Observation sheets, and the questionnaires. Based on the results of statistical analysis and discussion, the results obtained show that the level of quality of attachment teenagers aged 10-12 years who have a mother as migrant workers mostly in the category of being 55%, on 15% higher category and the category was lower by 30%. As for the level of self-esteem adolescents aged 10-12 years who have a mother sebaagai TKI mostly in the category of being 55%, the 25% category and the category was lower by 20%.

Perceptions of Ghanaian Migrant Mothers Living in London towards Postnatal Depression during Postnatal Periods

The concept of postnatal depression might be constructed differently by people with different cultures resulting in the adoption of different coping mechanisms. Ghanaian migrant mothers living in London are no exception. The aim of this paper is to examine the perception of Ghanaian migrant mothers living in London towards postnatal depression during the postnatal period. In-depth interviews, augmented with informal conversations, were conducted with 25 Ghanaian migrant mothers who were within the postnatal period in London. Data were thematically analysed and presented. The study found that although Ghanaian migrant mothers reported experiencing stressful situations due to breastfeeding, infant temperament, lack of social support and housing problems, they were reluctant to seek help from maternal mental health services because they did not trust those health professional they encountered. Ghanaian migrant mothers appreciated the support of health visitors but the absence of family support increased their stressful situations. They, therefore, sought help when they are depressed mostly from religious leaders, friends, and distanced relatives while in London. We argue that since the Ghanaian migrant mother is a subsystem of her larger family which consist of individual elements such as the spouse or partner and her child and also relates with the wider UK environment including the health care system and the church, a change in one has an effect on all. Thus, health professionals must clarify their roles to mothers and take measures to assess migrant mothers on all aspects that influence their postnatal experiences. Identifying additional support needs of these mothers by health professionals is also paramount.

Eine wohltuende Unsicherheit: On Naming and Authenticity in the Works of Milena Michiko Flašar

Author(s): Muston, Edward | Abstract: Through a close reading of the works by the young Austrian author Milena Michiko Flasar, this article explores the complex role of given, assumed, and socially imposed names for transnational subjects. For the first- and second-generation migrants in Flasar’s texts, migration and translation are both liberating and encumbering: In her first text [Ich bin], translation across linguistic and ethnic borders serves as the perfect defamiliarizing impetus for aesthetic production, while in her novel Okaasan: Meine unbekannte Mutter the plurality of names for the migrant mother inhibits the second-generation daughter’s search for a true or authentic name for herself. Nevertheless, instead of an economy of translation where one name replaces another, Flasar shows her figures gradually developing the capacity to maintain multiple names in different languages. I argue that this replaces the conventional model of individual authenticity as self-congruence with one that does not demand hypermastery of self and that bears witness to the true complexity of transnational experience. A final analysis of Flasar’s breakthrough novel Ich nannte ihn Krawatte builds on these themes to show that even non-migrants and non-minority subjects have access to this same complexity, one which in Flasar’s words infuses a wohltuende Unsicherheit [beneficial uncertainty] into even the most hegemonic society.

Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography by James R. Swensen

Reviewed by: Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography by James R. Swensen David D. Vail Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography. By James R. Swensen. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. xi + 196 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth. The 1930s is often considered through a historical lens as a decade of drought and depression. Most immediately think of Dorothea Lange’s 1936 “Migrant Mother” photograph, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, or Pare Lorentz’s film The Plow that Broke the Plains. But why? In Picturing Migrants, James R. Swensen insists the answer increasingly “depends less on personal experiences and more on the symbols and icons that have come to define this important period in American history” (3). Picturing Migrants highlights how, as the Farm Security Administration (FSA) assisted drought refugees from Oklahoma and other Great Plains states, photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Russell Lee captured despondent Americans trying to escape dangerous dust storms, drought, and depression. Swensen, though, broadens the scope to include other, lesser-known figures. “Authors and activists like Carey McWilliams, Sanora Babb, and Edwin Lanham also played a role, as did the photographer Horace Bristol” (6). Other FSA officials, such as a migrant camp director and regional bureaucrats, “were instrumental behind the scenes in shaping how the migrants were presented” (6). As Picturing Migrants presents these dynamic relationships through a powerful collection of images, new revelations emerge about the host of migrants, New Deal policymakers, and photographers of the decade. The ability to capture despondency and ecological disaster powerfully shaped American cultural responses and New Deal policies. However, the FSA also deeply informed John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. In subsequent chapters, Swensen traces how Roy Stryker (chief of the FSA’s historical section), various migrant accounts, and Resettlement Administration camp programs all represented “verbal pictures” for Steinbeck to understand a “common experience” of drought and depression refugees leaving the Great Plains for the West (38). Swensen is also clear that both Steinbeck’s book and the FSA photographs did not sit well with those Great Plains residents traveling along Highway 99—the so-called Dirty Plate Trail (21). Moreover, Picturing Migrants reveals how interwoven influences of FSA photography, personal accounts, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath crystallized to create a potent avatar of the 1930s. Swensen offers an engaging book mixed with an array of compelling historical photographs and well-researched prose that powerfully illustrate how New Deal FSA photographs “have shaped the national memory and have come to represent a defining period of American history. … [T]hey are, simply put, the image that come to mind when we think of the Great Depression” (196). [End Page 237] David D. Vail Department of History, University of Nebraska at Kearney Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography

Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography

Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives

If we are inclined to see the story of depression-era America in the troubled face of a migrant farm-worker mother from Dorothea Lange's iconic photograph, Holly Allen's study of cultural narratives of the New Deal and World War II prompts us to reconsider that association. Resonating across the political and cultural landscape explored in Forgotten Men and Fallen Women were narratives that voiced the threats to white male breadwinners and citizen-soldiers posed by unemployment and armies of transient men, dependent women, and people of color. Once Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the “forgotten man” into the American cultural imagination in a 1932 radio address, New Deal policy makers revealed that they had no intention of forgetting about the white male breadwinner. Relief policy privileged white married men above all others, thereby affirming “the ideal of white heterosexual masculine authority in the household and the public square” (p. 4). Criticism of federal unemployment relief was rooted in women-blaming narratives, focusing on the meddling of “pantry-snooping” female social workers who threatened masculine authority in their homes, or job-stealing married women workers who were “taking bread out of the mouths of others” (p. 101). Allen exposes as well the marginalization and blaming of women that undergirded civil defense programs on the wartime home front.

Migrant mothers, left-behind fathers: the negotiation of gender subjectivities in Indonesia and the Philippines

The distinct feminization of labour migration in Southeast Asia – particularly in the migration of breadwinning mothers as domestic and care workers in gender-segmented global labour markets – has altered care arrangements, gender roles and practices, as well as family relationships within the household significantly. Such changes were experienced by both the migrating women and other left-behind members of the family, particularly ‘substitute’ carers such as left-behind husbands. During the women’s absence from the home, householding strategies have to be reformulated when migrant women-as-mothers rewrite their roles (but often not their identities) through labour migration as productive workers who contribute to the well-being of their children via financial remittances and ‘long-distance mothering’, while left-behind fathers and/or other family members step up to assume some of the tasks vacated by the mother. Using both quantitative and qualitative interview material with returned migrants and left-behind household members in source communities in Indonesia and the Philippines experiencing considerable pressures from labour migration, this article explores how carework is redistributed in the migrant mother’s absence, and the ensuing implications on the gender roles of remaining family members, specifically left-behind fathers. It further examines how affected members of the household negotiate and respond to any changing gender ideologies brought about by the mother’s migration over time.

História e narrativa fotográfica: o caso de “Migrant Mother”, de Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange, fotógrafa documentarista, fez uma série de fotos em 1936 sobre uma família de trabalhadores migrantes. A principal dessas fotos foi denominada “Migrant Mother” e tornou-se um ícone dos tempos da grande depressão. O objetivo deste artigo é discutir a produção do conhecimento histórico a partir dessa série de imagens e da experiência de Florence Thompson, a mulher que foi fotografada. Ao fazer isto tentarei problematizar a narrativa fotográfica e alguns dos procedimentos de Lange à luz da história e do ofício do historiador.

Pathways of equality through education: impact of gender (in)equality and maternal education on exclusive breastfeeding among natives and migrants in Belgium.

Even though breastfeeding is typically considered the preferred feeding method for infants worldwide, in Belgium, breastfeeding rates remain low across native and migrant groups while the underlying determinants are unclear. Furthermore, research examining contextual effects, especially regarding gender (in)equality and ideology, has not been conducted. We hypothesized that greater gender equality scores in the country of origin will result in higher breastfeeding chances. Because gender equality does not operate only at the contextual level but can be mediated through individual level resources, we hypothesized the following for maternal education: higher maternal education will be an important positive predictor for exclusive breastfeeding chances in Belgium, but its effects will differ over subsequent origin countries. Based on IKAROS data (GeÏntegreerd Kind Activiteiten en Regio Ondersteunings Systeem), we perform multilevel analyses on 27 936 newborns. Feeding method is indicated by exclusive breastfeeding 3 months after childbirth. We measure gender (in)equality using Global Gender Gap scores from the mother's origin country. Maternal education is a metric variable based on International Standard Classification of Education indicators. Results show that 3.6% of the variation in breastfeeding can be explained by differences between the migrant mother's country of origin. However, the effect of gender (in)equality appears to be non-significant. After adding maternal education, the effect for origin countries scoring low on gender equality turns significant. Maternal education on its own shows strong positive association with exclusive breastfeeding and, furthermore, has different effects for different origin countries. Possible explanations are discussed in-depth setting direction for further research regarding the different pathways gender (in)equality and maternal education affect breastfeeding. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

DRAMOJE GIMTOJI KALBA

Straipsnyje analizuojama anglofoniskosios Kanados rasytojos Betty Quan drama Gimtoji kalba (Mother Tongue), siekiant panagrinėti kalbos ir tapatumo, siuo atveju motinos tapatumo santykį ir issiaiskinti, kaip motinos subjektyvumo tapsme dalyvauja, kokias funkcijas atlieka vaikų auginimo (mothering) kalba gyvenant motinai svetimoje kalbinėje aplinkoje. Pjesėje kuriamas motinos tapatumas analizuojamas pasitelkiant lycių studijų specialistės Irene Gedalof feministine migracijos teoriją ir psichoanalitines Julijos Borossa’os gimtosios kalbos bei Cathy Caruth traumos teorijas. Teigiama, kad motinos užsispyres kinų kalbos vartojimas anglų kalbos sąskaita yra teigiama praktika, padedanti issaugoti asmenybės vientisumą, taciau dėl asmeninės ir kultūrinės traumos virsta destruktyvia jėga, kliudancia tolesniam motinos subjektyvumo vystymuisi. Daroma isvada, kad sioje pjesėje atskleidžiamas svarbus issūkis užsienyje vaikus auginancioms motinoms – gebėjimas sukurti bendrą tapatumą su vaikais, jiems perduoti dalį savo kultūrinio ir kalbinio tapatumo, bet kartu susikurti naują migracinį daugiakalbį tapatumą, kuris būtų atviras vaikų gyvenamai kultūrai, priimtų ją, ismoktų jos kalbą, sugebėtų suvokti toje kultūroje gyvenancių vaikų poreikius ir juos patenkinti. The article explores maternal subjectivity of a migrant mother as portrayed in the play Mother Tongue by the Canadian playwright of Chinese origin Betty Quan. It argues that by reproducing home through embodied practices, such as speaking Cantonese to the exclusion of English to her children, the mother works against the dissolution of her identity, but due to the cultural and personal trauma, becomes fixated on that identity essentially belonging in the past and is only able to face the challenges of the present (such as acknowledging the needs of her growing children), when the set ways of family dynamics is disrupted. The development of her mother’s subjectivity is considered using theoretical models developed by gender and migration theorist Irene Gedalof and psychoanalyst Julia Borossa. Gedalof claims that the repetition of the same cultural rituals performed by migrant mothers is not an act of reproducing sameness, but rather a dynamic process that creates difference and produces rather than reproduces identities. Borossa argues that the mother tongue is always already lost to all humans. For her, becoming a fully formed subject involves accepting the loss of the childhood language and acquiescing to speaking a different language – be it a foreign language or the native tongue that has developed since childhood. It follows, that a fully developed migrant mother should be able to accept that she as a mother and her mother tongue can never coincide and resign to speaking a foreign language to her children whilst keeping her native tongue as memory-trace. In the case of the mother in Quan’s play, her fear of annihilation by her children’s voices in foreign English originates from her not having come to terms with the separation from her mother tongue, which is symbolically contained in her infantile fixation on and identification with the traumatic past together with the language of the past. However, the end of the play opens up a window of hope. In conclusion, the biggest challenge for a migrant mother in Mother Tongue is developing a common identity with her children who feel foreign to her. The play suggests that this can be achieved by passing on the mother’s cultural identity onto the children through ritualistic practices of which speaking the mother tongue is an important component, but also opening up to the children’s cultural difference by learning the language of their socialisation and the dominant culture thus establishing a more mature and empowered maternal subjectivity and capacity for more adequate mothering.

Migrant Mothers: Richard Harrington’s Indigenous ‘Madonnas’

Canadian photographer Richard Harrington has been recognised since the 1950s for his photographs of the Arctic, and specifically for portraits of the Padleimiut taken at a hunting camp in 1950 during a winter of acute shortages. Three were selected for Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man (1955). Of that group, two focused on motherhood through depictions of childbirth and maternal love; the latter is sometimes referred to as ‘Canada’s Madonna and Child’, making a timeless secular icon from the representation of a crisis. Harrington was a documentary photographer who made his living as a freelance photojournalist specialising in human interest stories and travel features for magazines and newspapers. On assignment in British Columbia for the Hudson’s Bay Company magazine The Beaver, he photographed a First Nations mother and child, an image entitled ‘Madonna of the Peace’. This photograph later graced the cover of a Roman Catholic missionary magazine, Pôle et Tropiques. This article draws parallels between Harrington’s photographs of Indigenous mothers and children and Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, using Harrington’s diaries and community-based research to reconstruct the lives of his subjects, and considering the sacrifice of knowledge to iconicity.

Migrant Women and Social Reproduction under Austerity

Since coming to power in 2010, the UK Coalition government has enacted a series of cuts to public spending, under the auspices of austerity. Underpinning these cuts is a neo-liberal model of citizenship, in which citizens are expected to be autonomous, independent and economically productive, and in which the responsibilities of citizenship outweigh the rights. This model of citizenship is characterised by a paradoxical approach to social reproduction. The Coalition government has taken a significant interest in social reproduction as a means of creating the next generation of ‘good’ neo-liberal citizens; yet, the current austerity measures involve the withdrawal of state support for social reproduction activities. Drawing on participant observation carried out with migrant women's groups in Sheffield and Manchester, as well as interviews with group members, this article demonstrates how the government's paradoxical approach to social reproduction, combined with gendered and racialised discourses of citizenship and ‘Britishness’, have led to policies that place ethnic minority migrant women in an untenable situation. The social reproduction activities of ethnic minority migrant women are the subject of intense government interest, because of the concern that they will be unable to produce ‘good’ neo-liberal citizens. In some cases, this has led to government policies clearly intended to dissuade ‘undesirable’ migrants from having children. In other cases, migrant women are expected to show their commitment to integration, both for themselves and their children, specifically by learning English, even as the government has drastically cut funding for English as a Second or Other Language (ESOL) classes. While seemingly paradoxical, this is in keeping with a racialised neo-liberal model of citizenship under which the ‘responsible’ migrant mother should be able to parent and learn English without government assistance. Nonetheless, these policies are actually self-defeating, as they prevent migrant women from exhibiting the very characteristics of neo-liberal citizenship that they are ostensibly trying to encourage.

Exploring subject positions and multiple temporalities through an Iranian migrant mother's family photograph albums

In this article, I draw on a research study of one Iranian migrant mother's generation of selves through her material configuration of her personal photograph albums and through our verbal reading of her photographs. The research engages in a visual-material feminist ethnographic approach, and is informed by the work of Gillian Rose and the understanding that family photographs are a means by which women negotiate subject positions. In this article, I discuss an unexpected finding of my research, the significance of multiple temporalities in a migrant mother's production of selves. The photo album practices of the participant mother of this study, ‘Parvin’, depart from the common social convention of mothers arranging their photograph albums to chart family growth following the model of milestones occurring over linear developmental time. Parvin does not limit herself to linear developmental time, but rather she mixes up photographs in her post-migration family albums to generate multiple temporalities woven together by an enveloping ‘mixed’ time. Drawing on both Julia Kristeva and Homi Bhaba's theories of temporality and the subject, I suggest that Parvin produces subject positions for self and family through a continual interweaving of a multitude of pasts into the present and through a subsuming of milestones within cyclical family time. Further, I suggest that through her generation of multiple temporalities, Parvin produces the subject position of ‘accommodating mother’. Finally, I highlight the potential afforded by considering the temporal and the spatial together in studies of migrant identity.

‘The project cannot be approved in its current form’: feminist visual research meets the human research ethics committee

This article reflects on a university human research ethics committee’s unease regarding a feminist visual pilot study within the field of education. The small exploratory study proposed to explore a migrant mother’s production of her son’s identity through her family photograph collection. The committee requested substantial changes to the research design which centred primarily on their concerns regarding risk of harm to pre-existing relationships, and also issues of anonymity and consent. I consider the combined liberal individualist, utilitarian and positivist biomedical basis for the ethics committee’s discomfort with the proposed research which was to involve members of my family. I draw on my experience of the review process to critique the human research ethics committee paradigm which constructs the ideal researcher as an objective and disinterested observer, hinges on a weighing of risks and benefits, and considers humans to be independent and equal. I demonstrate how the blanket application of these values acts to problematise some kinds of research, and how these values can be inappropriate, incompatible and even destructive when applied to research proposals that are exploratory, visual, and/or involve the researcher’s family members as participants.

RUMAH TANGGA MIGRAN DAN KESEHATAN ANAK YANG DITINGGALKAN ANALISA DATA SAKERTI 2007

This paper discuss about migrant household and the health outcome of the children’s age 0-14 years old. Using data IFLS at 2007, this paper has a purpose knowing the condition of child health at the migrant household where father’s migrant, mother’s migrant, parental migrant, and non migrant household. Using on the data of IFLS at 2007, founded 13.402 respondents at age 0-14 years old. Those are involves 505 children (3,8%) live at migrant father household; 285 children (2,1%) live at migrant mother household; 105 children (0,8%) live at father-mother migrant household and 12.507 children (93,3%) live at non migrant household. The result of this analysis such as: (1) the health status of children left hebind lower than children who’s living with their parent; (2) non migrant household is more educated, because the year of schoolingof household’s head and the caregiver of the children 0-14 years old arehigher than migrant household; (3) the absenteeism of mother on child health status (based on the result of the nurse observation, BMI and Hb level) at migrant mother household is lower than the child health at the others migrant household; (4) household in the urban area gives a positive impact on the health status based on the result of the nurse observation and BMI, but gives negative impact (decrease) on the child’s Hb level; (5) the increase of per capita expenditure gives a significant impact toward the increase of health child status based on the observation of nurse and BMI, but gives the decrease impact on Hb level and BMI after has been interacted by migrant household status.

Regulating migrant maternity: Nursing and midwifery’s emancipatory aims and assimilatory practices

In contemporary Western societies, birthing is framed as transformative for mothers; however, it is also a site for the regulation of women and the exercise of power relations by health professionals. Nursing scholarship often frames migrant mothers as a problem, yet nurses are imbricated within systems of scrutiny and regulation that are unevenly imposed on 'other' mothers. Discourses deployed by New Zealand Plunket nurses (who provide a universal 'well child' health service) to frame their understandings of migrant mothers were analysed using discourse analysis and concepts of power drawn from the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, read through a postcolonial feminist perspective. This research shows how Plunket nurses draw on liberal feminist discourses, which have emancipatory aims but reflect assimilatory practices, paradoxically disempowering women who do not subscribe to ideals of individual autonomy. Consequently, the migrant mother, her family and new baby are brought into a neoliberal project of maternal improvement through surveillance. This project--enacted differentially but consistently among nurses--attempts to alter maternal and familial relationships by 'improving' mothering. Feminist critiques of patriarchy in maternity must be supplemented by a critique of the implicitly western subject of maternity to make empowerment a possibility for all mothers.

Transnational labour migration and the politics of care in the Southeast Asian family

Recent increases in female labour migration in and from Asia have triggered a surge of interest in how the absence of the mother and wife for extended periods of time affects the left-behind family, particularly children, in labour-sending countries. While migration studies in the region have shown that the extended family, especially female relatives, is often called on for support in childcare during the mother’s absence it is not yet clear how childcare arrangements are made. Drawing on in-depth interviews with non-parent carers of left-behind children in Indonesia and Vietnam, the paper aims to unveil complexities and nuances around care in the context of transnational labour migration. In so doing it draws attention to the enduring influence of social norms on the organisation of family life when women are increasingly drawn into the global labour market. By contrasting a predominantly patrilineal East Asian family structure in Vietnam with what is often understood as a bilateral South-East Asian family structure in Indonesia, the paper seeks to provide interesting comparative insights into the adaptive strategies that the transnational family pursues in order to cope with the reproductive vacuum left behind by the migrant mother.

"A Democratic Way of Seeing"

"A Democratic Way of Seeing" Robert Vanderlan (bio) Linda Gordon . Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009. xxiii + 536 pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $35.00. Dorothea Lange took some of the most famous photographs in American history, including one—"Migrant Mother"—that has become an iconic image. Her work constitutes a great deal of our visual memory of the Great Depression, and at the same time, her photographs have become divorced from their original context. The photographs she took, along with those of her colleagues at the Farm Security Administration (FSA), were part of an effort to educate Americans about the realities of rural America during the Depression and to build political support for government aid programs. The work of Lange and the FSA, along with that of other pioneering documentarians, helped legitimate the expansive new role Franklin Roosevelt envisioned for government. Lange's photographs were moving and beautiful, and they remain so; yet, at the time they were taken, they were also politically potent. These photographs must constitute the core of any biography, and, unsurprisingly, Linda Gordon builds her major argument around Lange's Depression photographs. Calling her a "photographer of democracy, and for democracy" (p. xiii), Gordon argues that Lange's photographs "enlarged the popular understanding of who Americans were, providing a more democratic visual representation of the nation" (p. xiv). By depicting those sharecroppers and migrant workers who were invisible to most Americans, Lange was advancing claims for the dignity and humanity of the socially invisible. There was an implicit politics here, as Lange assumed that the viewer who granted the humanity of those depicted in her photographs would be better prepared to grant them the full rights of citizenship. Gordon calls Lange's method, "a democratic way of seeing" (p. 219), an evocative phrase that might have been the book's title. Instead, Gordon calls her biography A Life Beyond Limits. The decision prioritizes Lange's personal struggles and accomplishments. Lange was a pioneer. Acting with few models to follow or socially sanctioned avenues to walk, Lange forged a career as a portrait photographer and documentarian. She participated in two unusual marriages and achieved her own problematic balance between work, womanhood, and family. Here, too, Lange subscribed [End Page 481] to a democratic way of seeing. In personal no less than political terms, Lange envisioned a more democratic set of possibilities for women and for relationships between men and women. Lange, born Dorothea Nutzhorn, grew up in a prosperous, middle-class German American family in New Jersey. She contracted polio when she was seven, leaving her with a twisted left foot and permanent limp. Having expressed a desire to be a photographer, despite never having held a camera, Lange apprenticed herself to photographers. She moved to San Francisco with a friend in 1918 and became a professional portraitist. Cultivating both the wealthy customers who patronized her studio and the various modernist photographers in San Francisco, including a number of women, her studio became a bridge between artists and the liberal rich. Viewing herself as a "tradesman" (p. 63), Lange offered "her clientele a portraiture that suggested—or 'revealed,' she would say—individuality and a deep inner life" (p. 60). Throughout this biography, Gordon uses Lange's life as a springboard to describe the larger world she navigated. Sometimes uncomfortable analyzing Lange's photographs, Gordon is in her element describing the social history of the worlds Lange inhabited. The experiences of polio survivors, the immigrant family experience in Hoboken, N.J., the appeal of Isadora Duncan and the new woman ideology of the 1920s, the bohemian subculture of San Francisco, the cultural front on the West Coast, all receive detailed treatment. In many cases, Gordon's telling adds new complexity to our understanding of each, detailing the ways, for instance, in which West Coast modernism, even in San Francisco, was far less urban than the more familiar New York variants. None of these interpretations break new ground, but Gordon's deft handling breathes new life into old knowledge. The center of the book, and of Lange's life, arrives during the Great Depression, when Lange put her client-centered portrait talents...

Social sustainability for mothers in Hong Kong’s low-income communities

As residents in the low-income community, migrant mothers are a target group for the redesign of the sustainable community. Essential to the redesign is the identification of ways to improve the social sustainability, which means social support, social cohesion, and community participation among community residents. One of the ways identified for the present study is neighborhood walkability, which means that the workplace, daycare center, and community organization are within the resident’s walking distance. Based on a survey of 1076 Chinese migrant and native mothers living in three low-income communities in Hong Kong, China, the study examines linkages between neighborhood walkability and social sustainability. Results primarily indicate the contribution of neighborhood walkability to social sustainability. Importantly, neighborhood walkability mitigated some of the migrant mother’s disadvantage in social sustainability. These results consolidate principles for redesigning the low-income community to improve its socioeconomic sustainability. Accordingly, access to socioeconomic facilities is integral to the sustainability of the low-income community.

The Intercultural Challenges of General Practitioners in Norway with Migrant Patients

Migrants to Norway disproportionately use emergency medical services while under‐using primary care, obviating the medical and cost advantages of the Regular General Practitioner (RGP) scheme. Little is known about migrants' use of the RGP scheme and the obstacles that affect ability and motivation to obtain or comply with treatment. The authors questioned 12 GPs around Oslo who serve migrants, using a semi‐structured interview guide. GPs defined migrants in terms of socio‐cultural difference rather than legal status, these differences often obstructing doctor‐patient communication and understanding. GPs reported that migrants often seem helpless in dealing with the public health service owing to language difficulties, differences in expectations and a systemic failure to co‐ordinate care. The findings suggest the importance of providing information about health services in a migrant's mother tongue upon arrival in Norway, of GPs taking detailed patient histories from the beginning to identify obstacles to communication and treatment, and of co‐ordinating emergency services with other care.