Suchergebnisse

This photo-essay results from three-months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Melilla, a Spanish enclave in the north of Africa, in the framework of the ERC-funded project EU Border Care. It explores how, beyond a highly polarized debate, migration forms the very social fabric of the city. Melilla's economic fate is highly dependent on both regional border crossings and international migration. The 'migration industry' employs border guards and police forces but also social workers, translators, and healthcare professionals. Administratively, this border city can be characterized as a 'central periphery': while some sectors, such as health and education, depend more directly on the central Spanish government than it is the case for other regions, Melilla presents at the same time distinct tax and migration regimes. A regional migration regime facilitates mobility between the enclave and the neighboring Moroccan region of Nador as the movement of people and goods ensures the city's daily life. This photo-essay illustrates how formal borders create sharp cuts within geographical and social continuities. ; The work was supported by the European Research Council-funded project EU Border Care

While the feminisation of transnational migrant labour is now a firmly ingrained feature of the contemporary global economy, the specific experiences and understandings of labour in a range of gendered sectors of global and regional labour markets still require comparative and ethnographic attention. This book adopts a particular focus on migrants employed in sectors of the economy that are typically regarded as marginal or precarious – domestic work and care work in private homes and institutional settings, cleaning work in hospitals, call centre labour, informal trade – with the goal of understanding the aspirations and mobilities of migrants and their families across generations in relation to questions of gender and labour. Bringing together rich, fieldwork-based case studies on the experiences of migrants from the Philippines, Bolivia, Ecuador, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Mauritius, Brazil and India, among others, who live and work in countries within Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America, Gender, Work and Migration goes beyond a unique focus on migration to explore the implications of gendered labour patterns for migrants' empowerment and experiences of social mobility and immobility, their transnational involvement, and wider familial and social relationships.

The reproductive care of pregnant migrants entering the European Union via its Mediterranean borders represents an under-examined topic, despite a growing scholarly emphasis on female migrants and the gendered aspects of migration in the past three decades. This article uses ethnographic data gathered in Greece, Italy, and Spain to examine pregnant migrants' experiences of crossing, first reception, and reproductive care. We discuss our findings through the conceptual lens of vulnerability, which we understand as a shifting and relational condition attributed to, or dynamically endorsed by, migrant patients within given social contexts and encounters. We focus on two principal aspects of migrant women's experiences. First, we shed light on their profiles, their journeys to Europe via the three main Mediterranean routes, and the conditions of first reception. Through ethnographic vignettes we examine the diverse ways in which pregnant migrants become vulnerable within these contexts. Second, we turn to the reproductive healthcare they receive in EU borderlands. We explore how declinations of ideas of vulnerability shape the medical encounter between healthcare professionals and migrant women and how vulnerability is dynamically used or contested by migrant patients to engage in meaningful social relations in unpredictable and unstable borderlands. ; This article is based on research conducted as part of the ERC-funded project EU Border Care