Although with globalisation states are experiencing an erosion of their sovereignty, nation states continue to retain strong control over the question of ‘migrant belonging’ through official statistical categorisations, as well as through processes of ‘constructing national identity’. These are manifested at several levels of migrants’ everyday life, a crucial one being the labour market, which is at the focus of the paper. Female migrants’ positioning on the labour market is analysed through life stories (collected in 2006 and 2010) of female migrants from ‘third countries’ residing in Slovenia. Most female migrants do not have stable positions on the labour market nor are positioned in its upper segments, despite their skills and qualifications and/or experience delayed inclusion into the labour market. Consequently, working in the informal sector becomes an important source of income, which creates further possibilities for exploitation. Such a trend reflects increasing neoliberal and deregulating tendencies on the labour market. A comprehensive understanding of female migrants’ position on the labour market is achieved by the use of the intersectional approach that examines the interplay of different social axes of difference, the primary being gender, class and ethnicity.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 32024877Lack of public care services and the deregulation and privatisation of care are not only a characteristic of migrants’ ‘new societies’, but are a pressing issue in their ‘societies of origin’ as well. This trend, amplified by the demographic trend of population aging, thus poses significant challenges to both the welfare of their (aging) relatives (e.g. parents, children) in their ‘home countries’ and to migrants’ obligations and expectations towards care for the elderly and/or children directed at them. The notion of caring from a distance challenges the idea that care-giving necessarily requires geographical/physical proximity. Continuous transnational care-giving practices, not determined by localities, involve various aspects of care, such as material care (e.g. gifts, remittances), emotional care and practical care (especially through the use of various communication technologies, temporary or permanent relocation of migrants and/or their family members), thus significantly extending ‘traditional’ notions of care. To empirically study various care arrangements in migrant families, transnational care giving practices are analysed through selected life stories of female migrants residing in Slovenia.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 31327277In contemporary social science research, researchers largely perceive ethnic groups as a result of a process of boundary making rather than a taken for granted part of our world. However, in methodological terms, researchers often still see ethnicity as imposed on the research process rather than as constructed throughout it. Using personal experience from several research projects (mainly an international FP 6 project on female migrants and a postdoctoral research project on the classification and categorisation of migrants), the author first presents the role of ethnic belonging in her research. She then identifies other factors as crucial in negotiating insider/outsider status in the ‘field’. The author shows that the researcher’s insider/outsider status is not a fixed category, but is rather negotiated in the research process, depending on the researcher’s multiple and shifting positionalities. Drawing on the critique of methodological nationalism in the social sciences and the humanities and on the theories of transnationalism, she discusses the recent transformations of research designs in qualitative migration research and argues for more de-ethnicised research on migration. On this basis, she calls for migration research beyond locally bounded research sites.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 31326765