Talieh Mirsalehi
Health in Negotiation. Cultural Analytical Perspectives on Health and Inequalities in the Swedish Asylum Context
Lund Studies in Arts and Cultural Sciences 34
2024 | 240 s. | engelska

ISSN: 2001-7529
ISBN: 978-91-987325-8-0, 978-91-987325-9-7

This dissertation addresses the complex and multifaceted
relation between ‘irregular’ migration and the phenomenon of
health inequalities. The aim is to provide a cultural analytical
account of the ways in which people who undergo the asylum
process in Sweden navigate, negotiate, and practice health in
uncertain times. Through an ethnographic investigation into a
group of asylum seekers’ embodied experiences of evaluating
health, assessing risk, and preventing illness before and during
the COVID-19 pandemic, this study explores how ambiguities of
the asylum process is perceived and responded to by those who
hope to gain membership of the new society.
The analysis suggests that the notions of health, care,
immunity, and risk are boundary, contextual, situational — and
therefore negotiable — concepts, interpreted and enacted in
relation to ambivalent conditions of displacement in an asylum
context. In a healthcare paradigm where maintaining a healthy
lifestyle and preserving one’s body are promoted as a personal
responsibility and moral percept, generating good health
becomes a matter extending beyond its biological properties to
a performance of belonging. As well, disparities in health are
seen as reversible through alterations to individuals’ health and
care practices. This, in turn, results in the formation of strategies
to not only generate health, but to also show one’s attempt at
following the socioculturally constructed norms of health and
care as an accountable member of the new society. The findings
also highlight the importance of methodological considerations
when it concerns accessing and assessing the experiences and
perceptions of those who are deemed inaccessible, yet silently
and statistically present in public health reports.