Girlhood Studies; Doris Kakuru and Grace B. Kyomuhendo (Web)

Proposals by: 17.06.2024

This special issue aims to foster an in-depth understanding of how young motherhood among girls below the age of 20 is experienced and researched and of the impact such research has on these girls‘ lives in different global contexts. Despite the international commitments to human rights and social justice such as the UN-Convention on the Rights of the Child, the legal and institutional frameworks in many parts of the world often disregard the rights of girls including the need to prevent pregnancy among adolescents and reduce pregnancy-related mortality when working towards achieving Sustainable Development Goals 3 (good health and wellbeing and 5 gender equality).
Pregnant girls and young mothers are either ignored in research and practice or are framed in negative and deficit ways. For example, adolescent girls and their babies face higher health risks; these girls have been described as more likely to have a mental health diagnosis (Sekharan et al. 2015), misuse substances, be precariously housed, or lack prenatal care (Fleming et al. 2013). Young motherhood has also been held responsible for contributing to the pervasion of gender inequities in education (Bhana et al. 2013). Many girls are pressured or forced to drop out of school, thus reducing their economic prospects and making them more likely to experience poverty. They are also more likely to enter into child marriage, and to experience domestic violence.
There is a dearth of scholarly literature that addresses pregnant and parenting girls from the perspective of their agency and strengths, while illuminating the structural barriers to their wellbeing. The editors welcome articles that question these oppressive and exclusionary frameworks of research and practice. Articles could include young mothers‘ first-person narratives about their capabilities as knowers, knowledge producers, and tellers of their stories. The editors invite scholars, researchers, activists, and practitioners to contribute their original research articles, theoretical explorations, case studies, and interdisciplinary analyses that focus on pregnant girls and young mothers aged under 20 to enrich the discourse in offering greater detail based on intensive research. They encourage submissions that delve into the various dimensions of this topic, including but not limited to the following issues: Continue reading →

European Journal for Nursing History and Ethics; Fruzsina Müller, David Freis, and Pierre Pfütsch (Web)

Proposals by: 31.03.2024

The special issue (2025) aims to explore the relation between nursing and migration from different perspectives. The editors are seeking abstracts that will address historical and ethical issues pertaining to the topic of nurse migration, including the political, social and institutional contexts in which migrant nurses travel and work, their experiences as migrant nurses and their impact on both the nursing and the health system of their host country.
Staff shortages in nursing seem to be one of the constants in European health systems. As early as the 1950s, European states have found it necessary to recruit from abroad the qualified nurses and apprentices for the caring professions that were needed to mitigate a crisis in their health care systems. Since then the nursing shortages have only been reinforced by demographic changes and advances in health care. Today, through state-driven recruitment programmes, most developed countries employ a substantial number of migrant nurses, transforming the profile of nursing in Europe, North America and Australasia. Regular and irregular migration into formal and informal labour markets have played as much a role as the increasing care dependency on migrants in ageing societies. While some aspects of a migration history of nursing appear to be specific to the era of post-war globalisation, the entangled history of nursing and migration is considerably older, predating the modern profes-sionalisation of nursing.
Despite the obvious potentials of nursing history of migration and a migration history of nursing, the field is still largely underexplored. To date, historians of medicine and nursing in Europe have paid little attention to the relation of nursing and migration, and nor have scholars of migration history or contemporary history. Current historical research focuses on the multilayered marginalisation that migrants in the nursing profession experience. Due to an intersectional overlap of migration, gender and the social construction of nursing as a profession long considered as ancillary to medicine, migrant nurses could easily be overlooked by their nursing contemporaries and by later historians. Nevertheless, the gaps and desiderata are conspicuous, both because migration history and nursing history have become established and productive fields of historical inquiry in recent decades, and because the topic is evidently rele-vant to current and future debates about the related topics of population healthcare needs, workforce planning and nursing policy on training and recruitment. Read more and source … (Web)