International migration has grown in both scope and scale in recent decades. Almost half of the world's migrants move between countries lying within the global economic South, yet scholarship remains focused on South-to-North routes. This dissertation is a qualitative study of South-to-South migration experience of Nicaraguan women living in Costa Rica. In the mid-1990s, Costa Rica surpassed the United States as the primary destination for Nicaraguan migrants due to the coincided effects of economic distress in Nicaragua and economic developments in Costa Rica, creating gaps in the labor market that Nicaraguans filled.During the 1990s, the number of Nicaraguan migrants tripled to compose eight to sixteen percent of the Costa Rican population; women make up around half of the migrant population. What does the experience of moving between destination and origin contexts characterized by relative geographic, cultural, linguistic, economic and historical proximity reveal about the often juxtaposed social processes of integration and transnationalism? To explore this question, over a year of continuous ethnographic field research and systematic archival review of newspaper accounts were pursued in Costa Rica and Nicaragua (2005-06). Participant observation and 138 in-depth interviews were conducted with a purposeful sample of 43 migrant women, of whom two thirds were undocumented, and 12 Costa Rican health care workers. For its symbolic and material value to migrants and host country nationals, the health care system was the lens for examining migration issues and experience.Study findings suggest that multi-dimensional social forms of proximity for this migration circuit do not uniformly facilitate integration or transnationalism but rather the "paradoxes of proximity." Nicaraguan migrant women articulated feelings of profound exclusion and ambivalence about their lives. For Costa Ricans, migrants represented a threat to national ideals of "exceptionalism" central to historical accounts of their national identity. Ideals included racial and class homogeneity as well as the welfare state's successes in providing health care for all. By drawing on multiple theoretical perspectives from critical and clinical medical anthropology, feminist and historical anthropology, the study illustrates the importance of attending to paradoxical, local health-related experiences as a reflection of macro-level processes of globalization.

The requirements of European Unification, along with broader processes of globalization, including immigration, are reshaping economic and welfare priorities and reconfiguring the relationship between citizens and the state in Italy. The reorganization of the Italian welfare state around the principle of subsidiarity combines neoliberal restructuring with a commitment to social solidarity and cohesion and privileges the family as the social formation best suited to mediate between state, market, and citizens. As the state retreats from some of its former social welfare responsibilities, it simultaneously extends its reach into matters of reproduction and family-making. Biopolitics in the time of subsidiarity encompasses concerns over birth rates, the population, the rights of the unborn, and the proper composition of the family. This dissertation examines the terms of social cohesion in post-welfare Italy and the central role that matters of reproduction and the family play in its reformulation as a moral and cultural problem. I focus on three discursive sites: the politics of life; the assertion of the heteronormative family as an urgent and legitimate site of political intervention; and the parameters for the "appropriate" integration of migrants into Italian society. I draw on ethnographic inquiry with associations and individuals engaged in reproductive and migrant health and politics in Milan. Tracing the policies, practices, and discourses that seek to govern in the name of social cohesion sheds light on new citizenship projects and logics of inclusion/exclusion in the post-welfare moment and underscores the continued salience of gender, sexuality, and reproduction to processes of state building.

abstract: This research project analyzes women’s dynamic pathways to pregnancy prevention and termination in Arizona. Two levels of analysis guide the study: The first is a cultural analysis of the socio-legal conditions that shape the channels to birth control and abortion. During this historical moment, I analyze the fight over increasing (and calls for more) legal constraints against contraception and abortion, coupled with decreasing individual access to reproductive health care information and services. This dissertation includes an examination of the struggle over reproductive health on the ground and in the legal arena, and real pushbacks against these constraints as well. The second is an analysis of how women seek out contraception or abortion within the US socio-legal landscape. The study qualitatively examines narratives from 33 women in the greater Phoenix, Arizona area, a region emblematic of the political contest over the legal regulation of women’s reproductive health currently unfolding nationally. Ultimately, the state is implicated in the various resources and barriers—people, places, processes and policies—that inform women’s pregnancy prevention. These experiences can illuminate the ways that reproductive health care is shaped by intersecting and sometimes competing ideologies, and how women encounter them in their daily lives. The study theorizes the embodiment of women’s local encounters with the state within a cultural context of contested law and policy reform. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Justice Studies 2016

In this thesis I explore Donna Haraway’s planetary ethic of making kin, not babies (2016) and how it could be put into practice by way of my own struggles with myoma (common muscle knots in the uterine tissue) and the question of having children or not. The personal reflections herein are based on my own thoughts and concerns, drawn from diary entries and personal conversations, on the issue of birthing and raising children on “a damaged earth” (Haraway, 2016, p. 2). In doing this exposé of feminist reproductive politics and theory in a climate changed and environmentally altered world –Haraway’s ethos in particular– and juxtaposing this with my own localized and particular situation, the starting point for this thesis is that the personal is political, but also vice versa. Simply put, I seek a better understanding of what Haraway’s vision might look like if juxtaposed to a female central European, feminist 28-year old’s life (my own) in order to put theory to the test of lived experience. In my thesis I draw methodologically on both historiographical accounts of feminist science and technology studies and this field’s long-standing research traditions on reproductive politics, and on autoethnographic accounts of living with myoma and a desire for children thereby “connecting the personal to the cultural” (Ellis and Bochner, 2000, p. 739). Consider this thesis an invitation to watch me play string figures with myoddkin, to see us compose, re-compose, and decompose relational patterns among us.

My thesis deals with reproductive politics of socialist Czechoslovakia, focusing on the effect of abortion committees decision and its members in matter of legality of abortions since 1957. The theoretical part summarize knowledge about reproductive policy of socialist Czechoslovakia and the effect of abortion committees. The empirical part includes interviews with witnesses who had personal experience with abortion committees. Interviews are analyzed by means of encryption techniques inspired by grounded theory. The thesis includes analysis of six interviews with applicant of abortion, one interview with a partner of the applicant, five interviews with doctors - gynecologists and one with a former member of abortion committee. This thesis also process documents of National population comitee regarding on abortion comitees issues. Keywords: gender, reproductive politics, socialism, abortion, abortion committee, witnesses, social benefits

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