Expecting

Download a PDF version of the comic in Italian/French

Unlike other categories of migrants, undocumented pregnant women are a growing phenomenon, yet few social science or public health studies address EU migrant maternity care. As an exception, EU Border Care, led by Vanessa Grotti, is a comparative study of the politics of maternity care among undocumented migrants on the EU’s peripheries. EUBorderCare also focuses on the empirical analysis of personal and institutional relations of care and control in the context of pregnancy and childbirth in some of Europe’s most densely crossed borderlands in France, Greece, Italy and Spain.

Expecting by Sandrine Martin is a delicate and memorable story that involves the reader through many details and data collected by EUBorderCare and while avoiding rhetoric and stereotypes. Expecting is about the parallel paths of Sham and Matina - a migrant refugee from Syria and a Greek midwife working for an NGO, respectively. To create Expecting, the artist Sandrine Martin and the researcher Vanessa Grotti with her team – notably with Cynthia Malakasis – exchanged points of views and impression at length, and also travelled together to a refugee camp in Greece.

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The science behind the comic

Vanessa Grotti (researcher)

Vanessa Elisa Grotti is Part-time Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the EUI, where she is the Director of the EU BORDER CARE project, funded by an ERC Starting Grant (2015-2020). She is a social and medical anthropologist interested in the study of health and healthcare systems, migration and borderlands, gender and minority rights, especially in contexts of social change and crisis. Over the last 13 years, she has worked in South America, Europe and West Africa.
 She was trained at Oxford and Cambridge University and has held research and teaching positions at the Collège de France, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Oxford University.

Sandrine Martin (artist)

Since graduating from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Decoratifs, Paris in 2004, Sandrine Martin has been publishing her illustrations in books and in the press. She has worked for Le Monde, Libération, Psychologies Magazine, Bayard and Gallimard among others. She also regularly contributes short stories to the comic strip magazine Lapin by L'Association. In 2012 she published the collection of drawings "La Montagne de sucre" (L'Apocalypse); in 2014, she illustrated? a biography of the artist Niki de Saint Phalle by Dominique Osuch (Casterman); and in 2015, Martin published a collection of illustrated? short stories entitled "Petites Niaiseuses" (Misma).

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