Tanja Visic presents a working paper on ' “It’s time to move on”: Theoretical and conceptual framing of research on gendered aspects of contemporary female labor migration from the Former Yugoslavia to Germany'

 Framed as an outline of theoretical and methodological chapter of my dissertation this colloquium paper aims to to take an angle on what has been written so far and to situate my dissertation project in the broader literature on gender and migration studies whilst opening the door for qualitative research on gendered aspects of “labouring mobilities” of women from the Former Yugoslavia countries in Germany. The first aim of the paper is to take a chronological perspective, tracing the development of gender and migration studies in order to show how female migration is brought out of the shadow in many disciplines and how feminist academic critique affected main migration theories and paradigms creating a firm ground for interdisciplinary discussion in studies of migration. The second aim of the paper is to provide theoretical and conceptual framework for ethnographic research on domestic and care work from ex-Yugoslavia countries. As this is the first study discussing the relationship between gender and female migration from post-Yugoslavian societies to Germany, this paper seeks to address issues of geographical contextualization of female labor migration in order to challenge dominant concepts in the field of research while taking into account a historical background and problems of production of knowledge which contributes to understanding and explaining female migration for the last several decades. The theoretical framework will be used for researching and understanding how the citizenship, modes of employment and recruitment strategies informs life experiences and life biographies of women workers and and how contradictory migration policies allow to laboring subjects to combine irregular and regular aspects of employment – which will be the main focus of the following colloquium paper.