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Paper short abstract

This paper examines migrant women’s pursuit of paid work in Germany as a gendered moral economy of commitment and stake. Based on two years of ethnography in Halle (Saale), it analyzes these efforts as prolonged moral projects marked by unequal costs, uncertainty, and layered temporalities.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines migrant women’s pursuit of paid work and vocational trajectories in Germany as a gendered moral economy of commitment and stake. Drawing on two years of ethnographic engagement with migrant women participating in projects for labour market transition in Halle (Saale), the paper analyzes these pursuits not as linear pathways but as prolonged moral projects marked by unequal costs, uncertain outcomes, and layered temporalities.

Seeking paid work for migrant women is oriented towards securing material stability and individual autonomy, pursued alongside other moral projects that weigh on household obligations and transnational gendered expectations. Migrant women’s commitment for finding employment is a sustained emotional, material, and logistical labour carried out over time. These are repeatedly interrupted and recalibrated by care responsibilities, household coordination, and the management of family life, producing distinctly gendered temporalities of waiting, acceleration, and suspension. Their trajectories often unfold as marathons marked by delay, repetition, and endurance.

Everyday practices—attending language courses and Sprachcafes, volunteering, gathering certificates, deciphering correspondence, and navigating training and job-search infrastructures—constitute forms of labour that are rarely recognized as such, yet are essential to moving forward. Documents and credentials function as devices that translate dispersed effort into legible proof, while simultaneously disciplining women’s time and conduct. As emotional, temporal, and material investments accumulate, women’s stakes intensify, rendering withdrawal increasingly costly even as promised forms of independence remain deferred. By tracing commitment as lived and gendered labor, the paper contributes to moral economy debates by foregrounding endurance as a central analytic object.