Paper short abstract:

This presentation looks at European expat communities as a specific group of highly mobile people and focuses on the role of spouses and family who accompany their partners during a foreign assignment in Uganda.

Paper long abstract:

Preparations for foreign assignments are often framed by perceptions of heteronormative families and gender-specific labour division on the household level(Hindman 2007). When commercial enterprises, NGOs, development organisations and diplomatic missions send their employees across of the world, more often than not they send spouses and children too. Despite ongoing change in this sector, it is still mostly men who, as employees, are accompanied by their wives.

The paper considers how gender specific role expectations are reproduced and reinforced in the context of foreign assignments and how they are changing with a new generation of "expat girls" (see Fechter 2007). Examining the role(s) of accompanying spouses engages the nexus of migration, elite and gender studies. For this purpose I will utilise the findings of my PHD research with European expats in Kampala, Uganda (Aug./Sept. 2012 and Jan./Feb. 2013).

Based on Kreutzer and Roth, expats may be described as people who migrate voluntarily under relatively secure circumstances (Kreutzer/Roth 2006: 8). However, accompanying spouses often have no work permit in the destination country and remain unemployed, yet they play an important role on organizing family lives and set up "home" in the host country. This may result in dependency both in regard to the marriage as well as the deploying organisation. Few studies address the personal experiences of daily life of expat spouses or the factors that determine their transnational (family) lifestyle. The paper aims at looking at the specific situation of accompanying family members.