Leader: Sarah Songhorian (UniSR); Other collaborator(s): Laura Ferrero (UPO), UNIBA, Francesca Forle (UNISR)
Qualitative interviews will assess the extent to which diverse cultural backgrounds (controlled for gender) hinder healthcare professionals’ representations, communication, and caring practices. Subjects will be first-generation elderly immigrants and their offspring, as well as nurses and doctors. Recommendations for healthcare professionals (and other caregivers) will be made. Theoretically the duty to care can be grounded either on empathy or on justice. Thus, their respective benefits and limits will be investigated. A normative account needs to encompass both elements–rational and emotional–, while accounting for the empirical and cross-cultural investigation of actual care practices and of the factors promoting or hindering them.
Brief description of the activities and of the intermediate results
During the relevant period, we continued the fieldwork. From November to December Dr. Ferrero has conducted observation and interviews at “Camminare Insieme” (10 interviews). From January to March, she did the same at “Sermig” (5 interviews so far) and she visited the dorms where the association monthly visits other subjects that might be interesting for the purposes of our study (5 interviews). “Fragility”, “vulnerability”, and “immobility” emerged as relevant aspects of our research so far. In the next months, we will proceed with further evaluations on the interviews conducted. We also designed the contents of the interviews to be held with healthcare professionals (as the second population relevant to our research) and will start with a pilot with them and patients’ relatives (the contents of these interviews will be designed in April) to establish the most interesting population to focus the second stage of research.
Furthermore, two abstracts were presented within the topics of our research:
We have also participated and contributed to organizing the seminar of our WP and have attended several meetings (within the members of the members of the team, with the other tasks within the WP, and with scholars leading similar researches).
Finally, Dr. Ferrero supervised an MA thesis on the presence of older migrants in welcoming services.
Main policy, industrial and scientific implications
The work of our task is theoretical and empirical at the same time.
The empirical research is devoted to the analysis of the intersection between health, ageing and migration. the research we are carrying out is based on qualitative methodology: we choose two third sector ambulatories where we carried out 8 months of participant observation and we conducted 35 in depth interviews with people with migratory background aged 60 and more. The interviews are investigating the triple nexus between ageing, migration and health status.
Starting from a theoretical and empirical background the philosophical work is devoted to the communication between healthcare professionals and patients, with particular attention to cases of injustice and lack of empathy due to sociocultural differences.
We are working at the transcription and restitution of the interviews.
Meanwhile we are already working on the analysis of the collected material.
We are also planning a second stage of the empirical research, devoted to the so-called “zero generation” (reunited parents of migrants who were already living in Italy) and to the point of view of the social workers who work with aged migrants.
In the relevant period, the Task members have continued the fieldwork, have organised and participated in conferences on the task’s topics, and have prepared and submitted scientific papers.
In particular, Dr. Ferrero prepared and started the second phase of the fieldwork. She will conduct interviews to analyze how social and health services interact with older migrants, the challenges they are facing and the strategies they are implementing. In detail: She collected specific literature on this topic, She organized the list of contacts, carried out the procedure needed by Comune di Torino, prepared the draft of the interviews, and conducted the first ones. She also cooperated with colleagues in the preparation of the fieldwork on migrants' reunification of old parents. She collected specific literature on this topic, She organized the list of contacts, and prepared the draft of the interview.
The San Raffaele Unit has organized and attended two events related to the present project. The first is “Exploring Personal Identity. Philosophical Perspectives and Insights from Arts” (Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, October 2-4 2024), which has explored the topic of personal identity also in connection to older age (cfr. the keynote presentation by Sara Heinämaa on “Transformations of Aging: An Existential-Phenomenological Account”). The second is the workshop “Invecchiamento, demenza, vulnerabilità: una prospettiva di ricerca interdisciplinare” at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (November 28-29, 2024).
Dr. Forlè and Dr. Songhorian have also started the literature review for a paper on healthcare-patient communication in cases of older migrants.
The empirical research has been presented twice:
-“Ageing-in-place migrants: a glimpse within the category through the lens of marginality and immobility”, paper presented at the General Meeting Age-it, Università Cà Foscari, Venezia.
-“Where can we go?”. On migration, ageing and immobility, paper presented at the Agenet-Easa Conference, Kinning, Moving, and Growing in Later Life, Università Cà Foscari, Venezia.
A new paper has already been accepted for the SIAA Conference, that will be held in Messina in December 2024.
“Mondi Migranti”, a journal devoted to the study of migrant and migration-related dynamics, launched a call for papers under the title Older Migrants: Policies, services, forms of care. An article based on the empirical research has been submitted at the end of September. Another one is currently in preparation.
The San Raffaele team is also organizing two events for November 2024 and May 2025.
Dr. Ferrero has finalized and revised the paper “Traiettorie di esclusione e gestione della cronicità tra gli anziani di origine straniera” that is now been accepted for a special issue of the journal Mondi Migranti that will be published in 2025
-From the 18 to the 20 December Laura Ferrero participated to the SIAA Conference (Società Italiana di Antropologia Applicata). She presented a new paper under the title “Quando la precarietà si cronicizza”: migranti invecchiamento e immobilità
Dr. Forlè has finalized the paper “Becoming new in old age. Bodily experience and personal flourishing” that is now under review for a special issue of the journal Rivista di Estetica.
With Francesca De Vecchi and Roberta Sala, she has also started to work on the paper “Vulnerability and existential feelings of ageing: personal traits and public implications”, to be submitted to an international journal such as Journal of Social Ontology, The European Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies.