Late-career international migration and reproductive work. A comparison between Peruvian and Ukrainian women in the Southern Europe

Research on the relationship between reproductive work and women´s life trajectories including the experience of labour migration has mainly focused on the case of relatively young mothers who leave behind, or later re-join, their children. While it is true that most women migrate at a younger age, there are a significant number of cases of men and women who move abroad for labour purposes at a more advanced stage, undertaking a late-career migration. This is still an under-estimated and under-researched sub-field that uncovers a varied range of issues, including the global organization of reproductive work and the employment of migrant women as domestic workers late in their lives. By pooling the findings of two qualitative studies, this article focuses on Peruvian and Ukrainian women who seek employment in Spain and Italy when they are well into their forties, or older. A commonality the two groups of women share is that, independently of their level of education and professional experience, more often than not they end up as domestic and care workers. The article initially discusses the reasons for late-career female migration, taking into consideration the structural and personal determinants that have affected Peruvian and Ukrainian women’s careers in their countries of origin and settlement. After this, the focus is set on the characteristics of domestic employment at later life, on the impact on their current lives, including the transnational family organization, and on future labour and retirement prospects. Apart from an evaluation of objective working and living conditions, we discuss women’s personal impressions of being domestic workers in the context of their occupational experiences and family commitments. In this regard, women report varying levels of personal and professional satisfaction, as well as different patterns of continuity-discontinuity in their work and family lives, and of optimism towards the future. Divergences could be, to some extent, explained by the effect of migrants´ transnational social practices and policies of states.

Migrant women’s employment in paid reproductive work through the crisis: the case of Italy (2007-2012)

Paid reproductive work, especially in the case of cleaning and home-care for elderly people, is an important sector for foreign women in Italy. For this reason, since the beginning of the current economic crisis, scholars have wondered about the impact of the recession on migrant domestic workers. They have looked particularly at possible competition with Italian women entering the sector for lack of better alternatives. Our paper takes this discussion a step further by assessing the overall changes affecting migrant women in the Italian labour market, 2007-2012. We will look at how their position has been transformed, by taking both an ethnic perspective, in relation to Italian women, and a gender perspective, in relation to migrant men. By way of a conclusion, the argument will be made that there is a substantial lack of competition between Italian and foreign women in the care and domestic sector due to differences in their earnings, hours of work and activities.

Understandings of transnational families in debates on Migration and development

International migration sets in motion a range of significant transnational processes that connect countries and people. How migration interacts with development and how policies might promote and enhance such interactions have, since the turn of the millennium, gained attention on the international agenda. The recognition that transnational practices connect migrants and their families across sending and receiving societies forms part of this debate. The ways in which policy debate employs and understands transnational family ties nevertheless remain underexplored. This article sets out to discern the understandings of the family in two (often intermingled) debates concerned with transnational interactions: The largely state and policydriven discourse on the potential benefits of migration on economic development, and the largely academic transnational family literature focusing on issues of care and the micro-politics of gender and generation. Emphasizing the relation between diverse migration-development dynamics and specific family positions, we ask whether an analytical point of departure in respective transnational motherhood, fatherhood or childhood is linked to emphasizing certain outcomes. We conclude by sketching important strands of inclusions and exclusions of family matters in policy discourse and suggest ways to better integrate a transnational family perspective in global migration-development policy.

Perspectives on gender, migration and transnational work: joint work of social reproduction and care in Southern Europe

This paper presents the "state of the art" and some of the main issues discussed in relation to the topic of transnational migration and reproductive work in southern Europe. We start doing a genealogy of the complex theoretical development leading to the consolidation of the research program, linking consideration of gender with transnational migration and transformation of work and ways of survival, thus making the production aspects as reproductive, in a context of globalization. The analysis of the process of multiscale reconfiguration of social reproduction and care, with particular attention to its present global dimension is presented, pointing to the turning point of this line of research that would have taken place with the beginning of this century, with the rise notions such as "global care chains" (Hochschild, 2001), or "care drain" (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2013). Also, the role of this new agency, now composed in many cases women who migrate to other countries or continents, precisely to address these reproductive activities, is recognized. Finally, reference is made to some of the new conceptual and theoretical developments in this area.

Assessment of the EEE-4 oral test: a discourse analysis based on complex networks.

With the development of information technology, the theory and methodology of complex network has been introduced to the language research, which transforms the system of language in a complex networks composed of nodes and edges for the quantitative analysis about the language structure. The development of dependency grammar provides theoretical support for the construction of a treebank corpus, making possible a statistic analysis of complex networks. This paper introduces the theory and methodology of the complex network and builds dependency syntactic networks based on the treebank of speeches from the EEE-4 oral test. According to the analysis of the overall characteristics of the networks, including the number of edges, the number of the nodes, the average degree, the average path length, the network centrality and the degree distribution, it aims to find in the networks potential difference and similarity between various grades of speaking performance. Through clustering analysis, this research intends to prove the network parameters’ discriminating feature and provide potential reference for scoring speaking performance.