Women And Migration

This open access book focuses on Albanian internal and international female migration and places gender at the heart of postsocialist transformation. It explores the vulnerabilities that arise for female citizens from the contradictory policies produced by the Albanian state. By illuminating the intersection of gender and migration, it shows how Albanian women are likely to embed themselves in complex social relations and migration trajectories. By focusing on various cases – internal, international, return, economic and student female migrants – the book underlines that migration does not follow any kind of evolutionary development, according to which women go from 'traditional’ to ‘modern' gender relations. By providing a compelling account on the complex negotiations and tactics women employ to deal with gender inequalities, this book leads to a better understanding of gender and migration entanglements. It is a useful read to students, academics in migration and gender studies as well as social scientists and policy-makers in European countries.

This book examines the migration of women as gendered subjects to and from Turkey, using feminist research practices to explore a range of diverse experiences of migrant women as refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented or documented migrants. The collection includes contributions from researchers, practitioners, and migrants themselves to present a nuanced analysis that challenges binary divisions between ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ migrants and highlights the political and social agency of refugee and migrant women in Turkey. Drawing on a rich body of original empirical and theoretical research the volume explores recent policy change in Turkey, the political and social influences that have shaped migration policy (both internally and globally), and how women migrants have been positioned within its changing refugee and migration regimes. Analysis of the Turkish experience of redesigning migration policy in a country with weak civil protection against gender discrimination provides important lessons, in particular for countries in the Global South that are under pressure from the Global North to control and manage migrant flows. This interdisciplinary volume offers gender-sensitive recommendations for policymakers and practitioners and will advance global debates on migration management and governance across the fields of sociology, social policy, anthropology, labour economics and political science.

Approximately half of all migrants today are female. The contributors to this volume consider the ways in which attention to gender is moving debates away from old paradigms, such as the push/pull motivation which used to dominate the field of migration studies. The authors consider women's experience of migration, especially in long distance, transnational moves. They examine the extent to which labour migration is a social and strategic decision for women.

Seminal essays on how women adapt to the structural transformations caused by the large migration from Mexico to the U.S.A., how they create or contest representations of their identities in light of their marginality, and give voice to their own agency.

Includes statistics.

This book shines a light on the issues of governance, rights and the injustices that are meted out to an ever growing and vulnerable sector of the global migrant community – women. Whilst much of the current literature continues to focus on the issues of remittances and brain drain, there has been very little that examines concerns regarding governance and rights for female workers. This is especially true of the case of women who are particularly vulnerable and have been subject to sexual abuse. Such an omission is pressing given the fact that, as of 2009, only 42 countries have signed the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of Migrants and Members of their Families. The authors thus demonstrate that migrants moving within the Global South are at a greater risk of being subject to social injustices on account of less developed welfare systems.

Feminism and Migration: Cross-Cultural Engagements is a rich, original, and diverse collection on the intersections of feminism and migration in western and non-western contexts. This book explores the question: does migration empower women? Through wide-ranging topics on theorizing feminism in migration, contesting identities and agency, resistance and social justice, and religion for change, well-known and emerging scholars provide in-depth analysis of how social, cultural, political, and economic forces shape new modalities and perspectives among women upon migration. It highlights the centrality of the various meanings and interpretations of feminism(s) in the lives of immigrant and migrant women in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Eastern Europe, France, Greece, Japan, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Papua New Guinea, Spain, and the United States. The well-researched chapters explore the ways in which feminism and migration across cultures relate to women’s experiences in host societies --- as women, wives, mothers, exiles, nuns, and workers---and the avenues of interactions for change. Cross-cultural engagements point to the convergence and even disjunctures between (im)migrant and non-immigrant women that remain unrecognized in contemporary mainstream discourses on migration and feminism.

Based on the oral histories of eighty migrant women and thirty additional interviews with ‘native’ women in the ‘receiving’ countries, this volume documents the contemporary phenomenon of the feminisation of migration through an exploration of the lives of women, who have moved from Bulgaria and Hungary to Italy and the Netherlands. It assumes migrants to be active subjects, creating possibilities and taking decisions in their own lives, as well as being subject to legal and political regulation, and the book analyses the new forms of subjectivity that come about through mobility. Part I is a largely conceptual exploration of subjectivity, mobility and gender in Europe. The chapters in Part II focus on love, work, home, communication, and food, themes which emerged from the migrant women’s accounts. In Part III, based on the interviews with ‘native’ women – employers, friends, or in associations relevant to migrant women – the chapters analyse their representations of migrants, and the book goes on to explore forms of intersubjectivity between European women of different cultural origins. A major contribution of this book is to consider how the movement of people across Europe is changing the cultural and social landscape with implications for how we think about what Europe means. Cover image: Painting by Carla Accardi. Reproduced with the kind permission of Luca Barsi of the Galleria Accademia, Via Accademia Albertina 3/e, 10123 Torino.