Karina Michelle Edouard

This project traces how notions of motherhood both inform political movements and are similarly fashioned as political identities among Boston’s Haitian diaspora. Since as early as 2022, large numbers of Haitian refugees, including many pregnant women with young children, have emigrated to Boston—fleeing the humanitarian and political crisis unfolding in the country. My project explores how female Haitian-American political activists focusing on maternal health advocacy and the pregnant Haitian refugees they support negotiate the tension between motherhood as the foundation for collective action and connection, and motherhood as a perilous trajectory defined by the U.S. biomedical and immigration systems. I ask how these activists and refugee mothers’ practices of mutual care, concern, and obligation serve as fertile ground for the formation of new kinship bonds that unsettle rigid humanitarian distinctions between benefactor and beneficiary, suffering stranger and aid worker. By locating mutuality and reciprocity as a politics, I consider the dreams, aspirations, and struggles of female Haitian-American activists and pregnant Haitian refugees. Through 18 months of participant observation and in-depth interviews, I consider how activists and refugees use motherhood as a fraught and contradictory politics, asking what it means to labor in love in pursuit of transformative political realities.