IV ISA Forum of Sociology (February 23-28, 2021)

JS-10

Global Perspectives on Gender, Family, Labor, and Migration

Abstract Submissions Closed

RC32 Women, Gender and Society (host committee)
RC31 Sociology of Migration

Language: English

Session Type: Oral

Co-Session organizer: Music Lejla, associate prof., Visiting scholar at Suny University, New York. 

Over the last 40 years feminist and intersectional scholars who study migration have disrupted the masculine and economic-centric framing of migration. Contemporary scholarship on migration is characterized by complex and nuanced analysis of the experiences of immigrants and refugees as they move across the globe both from the global north to the global south and across the global south. The session invites papers that engage with the racialization and feminization of a global division of labor in the context of transnationalism, immigration and the refugee crisis, focused primarily on women’s participation and incorporation in the global economy. In the era of late capitalism and mass migrations, women are increasingly hailed as the economic providers in families, the main caregivers, transnational mothers, at the same time implicated as a vulnerable global workforce and a population in need of saving. How do we understand these phenomena? How are groups racialized and gendered to become “ideal” global commodities? What does it mean to be a “skilled” worker in this globally restructuring economy? How do women provide global labor to both formal and informal transnational circuits such as bodywork, health care, domestic work, caregiving, sex work and other forms of intimate labor? The session also calls for research on both paid and unpaid forms of work that women perform that enable global economies to thrive. The session will therefore explore issues of transnational families, refugee-ness, citizenship, skill, and transnationality.