Martina Cvajner
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226662251
- eISBN:
- 9780226662428
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226662428.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Migration Studies (including Refugee Studies)
What happens when a number of middle-aged, educated women – most of them mothers or grandmothers – see the last remnants of their previous professional and family lives destroyed by the umpteenth ...
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What happens when a number of middle-aged, educated women – most of them mothers or grandmothers – see the last remnants of their previous professional and family lives destroyed by the umpteenth sudden geopolitical crisis? When they migrate alone – outside of any official recruitment program, without relying on any network of already settled relatives – to an area with no previous history of immigration from their lands? When the only job open to them – live-in care work for elderly people – is one they feel is deeply degrading? While migration studies represent a vast field, we know little about the ways in which migrant pioneers, especially women pioneers, experience the contingencies that shape their emigration lives. This book tackles this under-researched area through the ethnographic story of a group of women pioneers emigrating from Eastern Europe to take jobs as care workers in northern Italy. Offering a contribution to the long-neglected field of the social psychology of migration, it deals with geographical mobility as lived experience, and it investigates how migration triggers changes in the ways migrants perceive themselves and others and the ways in which they learn to practice a new moral grammar that allows them to locate themselves in new contexts. Nearly two decades of intensive field work reveals the complex set of interactional encounters through which these women pioneers fashion new selves and construct a new meaningful social world out of the new conditions.Less
What happens when a number of middle-aged, educated women – most of them mothers or grandmothers – see the last remnants of their previous professional and family lives destroyed by the umpteenth sudden geopolitical crisis? When they migrate alone – outside of any official recruitment program, without relying on any network of already settled relatives – to an area with no previous history of immigration from their lands? When the only job open to them – live-in care work for elderly people – is one they feel is deeply degrading? While migration studies represent a vast field, we know little about the ways in which migrant pioneers, especially women pioneers, experience the contingencies that shape their emigration lives. This book tackles this under-researched area through the ethnographic story of a group of women pioneers emigrating from Eastern Europe to take jobs as care workers in northern Italy. Offering a contribution to the long-neglected field of the social psychology of migration, it deals with geographical mobility as lived experience, and it investigates how migration triggers changes in the ways migrants perceive themselves and others and the ways in which they learn to practice a new moral grammar that allows them to locate themselves in new contexts. Nearly two decades of intensive field work reveals the complex set of interactional encounters through which these women pioneers fashion new selves and construct a new meaningful social world out of the new conditions.
