Maria Kontos - Böcker

This timely and innovative book delivers a comprehensive analysis of the non-recognition of the right to a family life of migrant live-in domestic and care workers in Argentina, Canada, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Norway, the Philippines, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, the United States of America, and Ukraine.

This volume summarizes some results of the trans-national European research project „Self-employment activities concerning women and minorities: their success or failure in relation to social citizenship policies“ that was supported by the Directorate General Research of the European Commission within the Targeted Socio-Economic Research Program (TSER). The research was carried out over three years. We aimed at contributing to the knowledge of social exclusion and social integration through our analysis of non-privileged self-employment of na- ve women and migrant men and women in European countries. The research consists of comparative case studies in six European countries, in Northern and in Southern Europe. We concentrated on the study of four metropolitan regions, i.e., the Rhine/Main Region in Germany, Athens in Greece, Stockholm in Sweden, and London in the UK. In Denmark, the semi-metropolitan region of Aalborg and Aarhus were research sites. In Italy, we examined se- employment activities in the semi-rural region of Calabria. Research teams from the universities of Frankfurt/Main, Greenwich, Aalborg, Umeaå, Calabria, worked on the national cases of Germany, UK, Denmark, Sweden and Italy respectively, whereas the national case of Greece was conducted by the teams of the universities of Crete and Dundee and the Women’s Research Centre in Athens.

This timely and innovative book analyses the lives of new female migrants in the EU with a focus on the labour market, domestic work, care work and prostitution in particular. It provides a comparative analysis embracing eleven European countries from Northern (UK, Germany, Sweden, France), Southern (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Cyprus) and Eastern Europe (Poland, Slovenia), i.e. old and new immigration countries as well as old and new market economies. It maps labour market trends, welfare policies, migration laws, patterns of employment, and the working and social conditions of female migrants in different sectors of the labour market, formal and informal. It is particularly concerned with the strategies women use to counter the disadvantages they face. It analyses the ways in which gender hierarchies are intertwined with other social relations of power, providing a gendered and intersectional perspective, drawing on the biographies of migrant women.  The book highlights policy relevant issues and tries to uncover some of the contradictory assumptions relating to integration which it treats as a highly normative and problematic concept. It reframes integration in terms of greater equalisation and democratisation (entailed in the parameters of access, participation and belonging), pointing to its transnational and intersectional dimensions.