Paper short abstract:

The idea behind this article is to question the pre-established and seemingly objective categories of resistance and emancipation in the West by bringing them into the context of displaced women's lives.

Paper long abstract:

The research questions the pre-established categories of resistance and emancipation in the West by bringing them into the context of displaced women's lives. Qualitative data is collected at Europe's big entry point - the Western Mediterranean route (Barcelona, Spain) in 2019/2020. I argue that contextualizing individual destinies in migration management devices such as migrant labor unions, refugee camps, NGOs, foundations or unions would lead to a broader understanding of how migrant and refugee women come to individually resist and emancipate. In other words, this article questions the notions of emancipation, and resistance not as philosophical concepts, but as social experiences. It focuses on understanding how migrant and refugee women conceive and assign meaning to the idea of resistance and/or emancipation; how this idea is shaped during their lives as activists in unions; how it is built through contact and absence of public and private institutions; and how the idea is eventually integrated in their new everyday lives in host societies. This year-long qualitative research also seeks to understand how having to mobilize many different types of personal capital along with the migration route influences these individual's needs of the resistance-motivated battle some engage with. Through an ethnographic lens, I delve into the daily, intimate production of meaning attributed to resistance and/or emancipation from situations that came in and with displaced women to what is also known as fortress Europe.

Paper short abstract:

In this presentation I am drawing on findings from an ethnographic study on relatively privileged Colombian female migrants living in Melbourne, Australia to challenge traditional conceptions and representations of female migrants from the Global South migrating to the Global North.

Paper long abstract:

Literature on relatively privileged female migrants from the Global South moving to the Global North is scarce.

However, with changing visa regimes more and more relatively privileged and highly skilled women from the Global South move for reasons such as work, education, personal development or an adventure to countries of the Global North.

Tracing how privilege unfolds transnationally I am drawing on findings from an ethnographic study of seven middle- to upper-class and white Colombian female migrants living in Melbourne, Australia. Hereby, focusing on the life stories of three of the women, I am using an intersectional and translocational lens to understand the experiences of privilege of these Colombian female migrants.

In this presentation I am discussing the women's reasons to migrate which I argue are influenced by their privilege as well as their gender position in Colombian society. Further, I am presenting some of the effects of migration on these women's privileges in Australia. For example, they lose some of their class and white privileges but they gain more liberties as women through moving away from Colombia. These findings highlight the variety of experiences of female migrants and the importance of an intersectional lens when analysing these experiences.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the modes of female migration in academia and negotiations of forms of their realisations. It draws from multi-sited research among young scientists mainly in fields of physics and mathematics.

Paper long abstract:

After graduating from doctoral studies all new Ph.D. face difficult decision to be made. Those, who wish to continue career inside academia usually need to apply on postdoctoral researcher positions to high number of different universities or research institutes. Given that there are not so many positions opened each year, candidates cannot limit applications only to home university or those within one country. That perspective of not always willing migration is a major decision making factor and leads to disturbance of sense of stability - even if sometimes valorized as a chance to gain experience, social status or professional development. Since young academics have little control on the final destination of their migration and the fact, that it is usually short-termed with a concrete ending date I argue that it differs from other forms of professional migrations. Moreover some disciplines of science, especially physics and mathematics, are usually seen as highly masculine. Some institutes wish to change that by introducing gender equality practices both changing recruitment practices and day-to-day work. On the other hand there are still present some traditional ways of seeing female's role in society, that may not be fit for academic life. These facts add another layers and contexts, that influence females negotiations and strategies of ways to achieve certain stability in migration and academy. In my talk I would like to present aspects of female academic migration, on the basis of multi-sited research, conducted in Kraków, London, Stockholm and Zurich.

Paper short abstract:

The research uses a series of in-depth interviews to show the stories of Bulgarian female entrepreneurs who are managing their own business ventures in London. Thus, combining anthropological methodology with feminist epistemology.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1980s female entrepreneurship has started to attract increasing attention among scholars, policy-makers, and activists around the world. Even though there are 3 different phases of the development of this academic field and quite a lot of data has already been gathered, there are a number of existing knowledge gaps. One such gap is linked with the lack of research done about female migrants in developed countries. Another gap is linked with the lack of scholars who adopt the feminist epistemology in their research, thus, reaching solely superficial conclusions about the differences between female and male behaviour, but not being able to look beyond.

The current research addresses both of these gaps by showing the stories of female entrepreneurs of Bulgarian descent in London and mapping their business ventures. Thus, highlighting the ways in which they are different from all the other migrants in regard to opportunities, and challenges that they keep facing on an everyday basis.

Paper short abstract:

Malian women's mobilities are associated with numerous meanings and partly constrained by Islamic, patriarchal and Mande ideals. Discourses on women's mobilities and the 'strangerhood' of women reflect notions of "ideal femininity" but also, alternative femininities and changing gender ideologies.

Paper long abstract:

African women have always migrated and female autonomous migration in West Africa is on the increase, partly due to the changing structure of economic activities since the 1990s. Despite increasing global attention to women's involvement in migration, very little research has looked at Malian women's different forms of mobility, beyond the "rural exodus" from the countryside into towns. In West Africa, women's mobilities tend to be restricted and regulated by men; hence, women are often not expected to be highly mobile or to migrate autonomously. This paper delves into some of the numerous and contested meanings associated with Malian women's mobilities and reflects on the wider discourses and ideologies upon which these meanings were founded. It draws on twelve months of fieldwork in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, with female traders of Malian backgrounds. The paper discusses the relevance of local Islamic, patriarchal and Mande ideals to understanding perceptions of and constraints upon women's mobilities, emphasising some of the conflicts over the meanings associated with women's mobilities. It then examines some of the parallels between migrancy and womanhood, as reflected in local terminology which linked womanhood to liminal or perpetual conditions of strangerhood. By looking at the meanings of women's mobilities it becomes possible to explore not only what "ideal femininity" looked like but also, to consider alternative femininities and the changing discourses on gender.

Paper short abstract:

Based on anthropological fieldwork in Ethiopia and Tanzania, this paper examines the complex set of motives, expectations and hopes behind the movement of girls into domestic work in homes other than those of their natal nuclear families.

Paper long abstract:

Based on anthropological fieldwork in Ethiopia and Tanzania, this paper focuses on the experiences, life choices and aspirations of young women who migrate internally, mainly from rural to urban areas, to work as domestic workers within the households of their employers. Domestic workers are not an homogeneous group. A complex variety of reasons, desires and expectations shapes their movements, and individual responses to different situations differ. Poverty of their families is not the only reason that push girls to leave their place of origin. The intent of my study is to investigate the diversity of domestic workers experiences listening to their narratives and analysing the ways in which they construct their identities and histories. Giving space to their voices, I explore the trajectories that they follow and the decisions that they take. Decisions are never only individually and unilaterally taken, rather they are influenced by others in several ways. Moreover, decisions are taken within very constrained options and take shape from the ongoing dialect between opportunities and structural constraints. The intent of my study is to bring an accurate overview of domestic workers experiences in both countries. While taking in consideration vulnerabilities and risks of their precarious lives, I investigate both the gendered context-specific and the structural constraints that they face. At the same time, I investigate several strategies that domestic workers employ to improve their precarious lives and carve out personal spaces of action.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the successful experiences of the Chinese female migrant workers against the backdrop of China's massive rural-urban migration. It offers insights into the ways in which they achieve upward mobility beyond theoretical frameworks of autonomous female migration and women's agency.

Paper long abstract:

The scale of China's rural-urban migration in the post-Mao era is unprecedented in human history. While the total number of international migrants was estimated to be approximately 272 million in 2019 by the United Nations, the number of migrant workers in China reached about 288 million in 2018 according to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics. Of which, the female migrant workers amounted to 34.8%.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Chengdu, the metropolis of southwest China, where a large number of female migrant workers concentrate, this paper is concerned with the increasingly heterogeneous urban experiences of female migrant workers, and the ways in which some of them manage to achieve upward mobility during their migrating process. Those female migrants are found to share similar aspirations, in the sense of what Appadurai (2004) notes as "the capacity to aspire…as a cultural capacity, especially among the poor". However, beyond what can be described as autonomous female migration and women's agency, many female migrants spoke of the importance of family support and challenges and opportunities brought about by shifting state discourses.

Female migration in China can be compared to female migration in the EU in the context of neoliberal globalisation, as well as to rural urban migration during the Industrial Revolution in 19th century England. Female migration in China is better understood when viewed as part of a changing, globalising world.

Paper short abstract:

This work approaches the recent migration of Colombian and Brazilian single women to the Iberian Peninsula and tries to unveil its complex character in which, the colonial past, the latest expansion of capital and borders, and the subsequent reconfiguration of the feminine condition, crystallize.

Paper long abstract:

In Spain and Portugal, the rebound of arrivals in recent years of single migrant women from Colombia and Brazil, attests to the impossibility of living in Latin America under the Neoliberal regime, and it also rediscovers the current validity of colonial history as a main conditioner of human displacements across the Atlantic Ocean.

Departing from a multi-situated fieldwork carried out between the urban peripheries of São Paulo, Porto and Madrid, which entails 20 in-depth interviews conducted with Brazilian and Colombian women who have migrated to the Iberian Peninsula; our work furthers the concept of 'autonomy of migrations' (Cordero, Mezzadra and Varela, 2019).

We try to approach the complex causality that makes these women travel alone, focusing on the inevitable overlap between `the structural´ and `the personal´ that emerges in the hybrid narratives that Colombian and Brazilian migrant women deploy to explain themselves and to make sense of their migratory and vital trajectories.

The research addresses the specific ways in which the process of neoliberalization of life, -with the transformation of temporal and spatial parameters that it implies-, has impacted Latin American women. Thus, built upon these women testimonies, this paper analyses migration as a direct consequence of the expansion of capital and borders, but also as a form of political and daily resistance against it.

Paper short abstract:

Esta comunicação pretende discutir, a partir de um estudo de caso, o fenómeno da violência em relações de intimidade vivenciadas por mulheres imigrantes, usando como referência a teoria da interseccionalidade.

Paper long abstract:

Esta comunicação pretende discutir o fenómeno da violência de género em relações de intimidade vivenciadas por mulheres imigrantes, usando como referência a teoria da interseccionalidade. A partir de um estudo de caso, analisam-se as vivências de uma mulher brasileira vítima de violência de género por parte do parceiro íntimo. Pretende-se desocultar uma forma de violência que afeta de forma particular as mulheres imigrantes e que tem sido largamente ignorada pelos estudos de violência de género e pelos estudos migratórios em Portugal. As evidências encontradas neste estudo clarificam os dados apontados na literatura no que respeita à associação entre condições estruturais de desigualdade social e vulnerabilidade às vivências de violência de género no foro das intimidades, bem como aponta novas pistas de reflexão/ação sensível à diversidade das vítimas.