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.

Elena Borghi gives a paper on '“Unaided by men, they will discover their own strength”. Margaret Cousins, the Women’s Indian Association and the formulation of new gender norms in late-colonial India (1917-27)'

The paper is part of the project on which I am working as an ICAS fellow. The project is about Indian first-wave feminism, a tag designating the organised women’s movement which developed in the first decades of the 1900s. In particular, the project looks at the gendered norms and emotions governing the two main associations that constituted firstwave feminism in India—the Women’s Indian Association (1917) and the All-India Women’s Conference (1927).

The paper focuses on the experience of the Women’s Indian Association (WIA), the first pan-Indian women’s organisation and one of the main actors composing first-wave feminism in early-twentieth century India. The WIA was crucial in the propagation of anti-imperialist, nationalist stances, and often constructed such stances as the main goals behind women’s proactive participation in the world outside their homes. The WIA’s message depicted women’s subjugation as a metaphor of India’s political subjugation, and the improvement of women’s condition as a prerequisite for and a necessary step towards the country’s emancipation from colonial domination. It was mainly within this broader framework, therefore, that the WIA promoted women’s education and independent initiative. While historiography has tackled these aspects, other, more subtle contributions of firstwave feminism have been overlooked. The following pages point in that direction. They contain some preliminary considerations on the role of the WIA and the main driving force behind it, Margaret Cousins, in the construction of an alternative system of feeling and emotional climate, which the women participating in the movement were encouraged to espouse. The first section of the paper introduces Margaret Cousins. It sheds light on her thinking and life trajectory, on which she arguably grounded the understanding of gender roles and women’s position that informed the message of the WIA. The second section looks at the WIA as an organ trying to shape a community governed by a peculiar emotionology; and the last section sheds some light on the reception of the emotional norms spread by the WIA through the experiences of some of the women who engaged with the association in the very first phase of its existence.

Tanja Visic is presenting a working paper on 'Ethnography of living arrangements, informal work and the transnational care: Experiences of domestic workers from the former Yugoslavia in Germany'

The main objective of the doctoral research project is to examine the phenomenon of care and domestic work from a perspective that combines a macro-level and micro-level using ethnographic approach based on case studies, thick descriptions and perspectives from the actor’s points of view. The text you are reading is doctoral dissertation description which is divided into five parts. The first part introduces the subject of research, main research questions and information about fieldwork that has been conducted so far. The next two sections outline main theoretical debates around domestic and care work within feminist theorization of care work, migration and globalization studies. In the fourth and fifth section I contextualize previously mentioned debates within Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav female labour migration indicating the research gaps in the field and potential contributions of my research project. Next two parts will inform you about research questions, levels of analysis, approach to the research and concepts which will be applied in the study. In the last part I will present multiple practices of data collection known as ethnography I use in the research, and shortly introduce the methodology, namely the challenges of feminist ethnography while focusing on production of knowledge about women lives in specific socio-cultural contexts.