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Migrant Health: Exploring The Effects Of Migration On Health And Wellbeing Through Art And Storytelling Across The Life Course
Vesely, Katherine Julissa
Vesely, Katherine Julissa
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Given the importance of Latino migrant farmworkers to the US agricultural industry, scholarship has increasingly focused on the welfare of migrants. Studies have consistently found that issues of discrimination, social disconnection, and inaccessibility to services in the destination country are detrimental to the health and wellbeing of migrants. While these insights have helped inform health equity programs to support migrants upon their arrival, there is little focus on the origin of these health issues and how they have evolved as migrants move from their homeland to their destination country. The life course approach provides one framework that allows for an amplified consideration of the impacts of health along all stages of migration by tracking health journeys across time and space. This study employs the life course approach, guided by the following research questions: 1. What are the issues and experiences that are present in migrants’ lives throughout time in their country of origin, during migration, and in country of destination, and how do they shift? How do these conditions interact with migrants' health and wellbeing? 2. In what ways do migrant workers cope and try to resolve health and social problems when faced with structural inequalities/vulnerabilities? 3. What can the healthcare system and community partners do to better take into account and address the process of migration on the body? To answer the research questions, 15 migrant workers from Addison County and Chittenden County participated in bodymap storytelling, a method in which individuals created maps of their bodies with elements that represented aspects of their life, as well as semi-structured interviews, to analyze how their health has been shaped and influenced throughout the migration process. The findings reveal cumulative and consistent structural inequalities across individuals’ lives, emotional and embodied consequences of those inequities, shifting relationships, and experiences of loss. These findings demonstrate the importance of taking entire life histories of migrant individuals into account to better understand their health, as snapshots in time cannot capture the ways their health has been shaped and changed throughout time. The findings hold implications for future research, encouraging the use of creative, arts based and body-based methods to investigate life histories and health. The findings also hold implications for programmatic practices in Vermont health equity programs, medical providers, and broad policy reform, as there is a call for reform to lessen the impact of structural inequalities experienced throughout the life course.
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2026
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Vesely_uvm_0243N_11966.pdf
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- Embargoed until 2027-12-05