Short Abstract

This panel explores how various actors involved in labour migration navigate and reshape normative skill categories. Taking a feminist-relational approach, it focuses on skill mobility, education and training, and the ways workers negotiate skill regimes across changing institutional and policy contexts.

Long Abstract

Normative categories of skill (low/high-skilled, skilled/non-skilled) strongly structure the ways (migrant) populations, individuals and their experiences are studied and governed. Critical scholarships have shown how social construction and politics of skill produce gendered and racialized hierarchies of deservingness that legitimise (migrant) labor value extraction by states, companies, brokers, recruitment agencies, and other social agents.

Building on these scholarships, the panel (2 90min slots, 8 papers) takes up a feminist-relational approach to explore how individuals and institutions involved in migration processes relate to and reshape normative skill categories, and how these relations intersect with workers’ migration biographies, skill acquisition (i.e., education/training), and diverse work settings. We ask how skills move and change through migration and labour mobility (up-/de-/cross-skilling)? What forms of education/training enable or emerge from such skill movements? How do (migrant) workers relationally navigate and potentially transform regimes of skill within changing institutional and policy landscapes? How do they relate to and encounter others in and beyond the skilled/unskilled binary?

The panel pays particular attention to healthcare contexts as prime global sites where individuals and skills are brought together and where gendered and racialized hierarchies are reproduced. However, we adopt an extended notion of care to address the interconnections between migration, skills and the crisis of care across societal sectors such as health, social services, education or humanitarian work.

We invite (ethnographic) papers critically exploring (migrant) labor and regimes of skill across diverse care contexts, including hospitals, elderly homes, live-in care, social/youth work, child-care, humanitarian/migration sector, schools, etc.