The project InMigrHealth – Investigating Migrants' Occupational Health – aims to develop a multidisciplinary and multimethod analytical framework to comprehensively study migrants’ occupational health. Bringing together sociological, anthropological and epidemiological approaches, the InMigrHealth team will conduct quanti-qualitative empirical research in two local contexts, in the North and South of Italy.
The team will examine migrants’ health in workplaces, such as agricultural companies and healthcare residential facilities, where labour is physically and mentally demanding, dangerous and poorly paid and where the workforce is highly gendered. In particular, the project considers health social determinants, examining how individual factors (gender, age, social background), working and living conditions impact migrants’ health. In addition, the project focuses on the social consequences of illness, exploring its ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ perceptions and representations, as well as migrants’ resources and coping strategies in cases of illness. Finally, the project investigates if and how local territories recognise and support migrant workers’ health needs.
The InMigrHealth research team is composed of three units, with different disciplinary expertise: UniPd and UniMe will realise ethnographic research in two contexts selected as case studies, conducting participant observation within migrants’ working and living spaces and biographical interviews. In parallel and in the same contexts, UniTo will administer a questionnaire to conduct an anamnestic analysis and risk evaluations. Moreover, UniTo will conduct an analysis on administrative datasets (SLI and WHIP) on mainly musculoskeletal disorders, mortality and cardiovascular diseases, considering migrant farmworkers and social-health practitioners.