Although with globalisation states are experiencing an erosion of their sovereignty, nation states continue to retain strong control over the question of ‘migrant belonging’ through official statistical categorisations, as well as through processes of ‘constructing national identity’. These are manifested at several levels of migrants’ everyday life, a crucial one being the labour market, which is at the focus of the paper. Female migrants’ positioning on the labour market is analysed through life stories (collected in 2006 and 2010) of migrants from ‘third countries’ residing in Slovenia. Most migrants do not have stable positions on the labour market nor are positioned in its upper segments, despite their skills and qualifications and/or experience delayed inclusion into the labour market. Consequently, working in the informal sector becomes an important source of income, which creates further possibilities for exploitation. Such a trend reflects increasing neoliberal and deregulating tendencies on the labour market. A comprehensive understanding of migrants’ position on the labour market is achieved by the use of the intersectional approach that examines the interplay of different social axes of difference, the primary being gender, class and ethnicity.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 32024877Lack of public care services and the deregulation and privatisation of care are not only a characteristic of migrants’ ‘new societies’, but are a pressing issue in their ‘societies of origin’ as well. This trend, amplified by the demographic trend of population aging, thus poses significant challenges to both the welfare of their (aging) relatives (e.g. parents, children) in their ‘home countries’ and to migrants’ obligations and expectations towards care for the elderly and/or children directed at them. The notion of caring from a distance challenges the idea that care-giving necessarily requires geographical/physical proximity. Continuous transnational care-giving practices, not determined by localities, involve various aspects of care, such as material care (e.g. gifts, remittances), emotional care and practical care (especially through the use of various communication technologies, temporary or permanent relocation of migrants and/or their family members), thus significantly extending ‘traditional’ notions of care. To empirically study various care arrangements in migrant families, transnational care giving practices are analysed through selected life stories of female migrants residing in Slovenia.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 31327277In the contribution, which was prepared for the consultation 'Development of integration network: the case of Ljubljana, thematic section: Research on migration and minorities, on 7th April 2010, the author presented the role of the categories of gender and age for migration research. Although the category of gender is increasingly present in migration research in Slovenia, age is still a largely overlooked category in the study of migration. Various stakeholders in migration were presented with implications for policy formation by taking gender and age into account.
B.06 Other
COBISS.SI-ID: 31215917One of the key characteristics of contemporary migration is its feminisation. However, the experiences of women were largely overlooked in ‘mainstream’ migration studies. Women were perceived as passive agents in the migration process and their role was mainly reduced to secondary (family) migrants following men as supposedly the most important actors in the migration process. A second prevailing aspect of classical migration theory is a general over-exaggeration of economic motives for migration. It is not an exaggeration to state that migration of women within the former Yugoslav republics, at that time defined as internal migration, was largely perceived by public and policy actors in such frameworks as well. The main aim of the proposed contribution is thus to shed light on the experiences of women who have migrated from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Slovenia in the socialist period by examining their life-stories. The stories point to the gaps in statistical categorisations of migration that fail to capture the diverse and changing motives of the collocutors throughout the life-course and point to highly diversified contexts of socialist mobility. Experiences of women from Bosnia and Herzegovina in the ‘socialist’ as well as during the ‘post-socialist’ period are also examined. It is argued that in the process of creating the sovereign Slovenian nation-state, a distinction between ‘ethnic’ Slovenians and those ‘Others’ that were increasingly perceived as culturally different from the majority population, increasingly appeared in public discourses thus influencing women’s life-courses significantly.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 34804013