Irina Isaakyan

Anglophone marriage-migrants in Southern Europe : a study of expat nationalism and integration dynamics

Today marriage-migration remains the dominant form of naturalization in Italy and Greece, even for women from such high-income countries as the USA. Pilot studies of intra-OECD female migrants to Southern Europe show that the majority of them marry local men, consider their matrimony a mistake, and feel isolated. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive knowledge about dynamics of their socio-cultural integration or expat nationalism (although scholarship generally acknowledges a strong relationship between these two processes). Based on narrative-biographic interviews with 60 Anglophone female expatriates married to Italian and Greek men, our study explores the womens negotiation of culture within the context of their Italian and Greek families, and looks at emerging challenges for their integration. We show that these women are nationalistic and culturally stringent actors, who often find it extremely difficult fully to learn and integrate to the new cultures of Southern Europe.

Re-Thinking the Gender Dimension of High-Skill Migration

As explained in the previous chapter, she and other US-national women in Italy and Greece admit to having problems with the initiation of their own enterprises, recognition of their professional credentials and generally dealing with a local immigrant-unfriendly infrastructure. ‘I keep asking myself’, further confesses Pearl, ‘Was it just because I was a foreigner or because I was a foreign woman?’

Reflections on diaspora and soft power: community building among female US expats in Southern Europe

ABSTRACT Illuminated by life stories of American women in Italy and Greece, our work examines a complex relationship between expatriate collectivity and soft power agency. The data were collected from in-depth interviews with 60 US nationals who live in Italy and Greece. Our findings show that these women shape as a strong diasporic collectivity through activities of ecological civic engagement, which, however, do not result in a successful exercise of soft power. The isolationist nature of their collectivity causes a number of diasporic mistakes and turns their chosen community project into a weak resource for soft power, a translation of which remains highly problematic. The basic mistakes that such expats make while exercising soft power are misunderstanding of the notions of community and its main building tool (civic engagement) as well as overall inability to learn the new culture quickly.

Sending so much more than money : exploring social remittances and transnational mobility

ABSTRACT Based on 324 in-depth interviews with Indian, Moroccan, Ukrainian, Bosnian and Filipino migrants based in four EU countries (Austria, Italy, Spain and the UK), our paper explores the relationship between social remittances and transnational mobility. We develop a new typology of social remittances as based on the principle of mobility. We argue that the degree to which transnational mobility is present in social remittances depends on the agency of the sender and on the nature of the receiving community. We further elaborate on such mobility-related concepts as “transnational re-scaling” (in reference to directionality of social remittances) and “translocal celebrity” (in reference to sender’s role in cultural production). Based on a large qualitative dataset, this study also contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between the local and the global.

Female High-Skill Migration in the 21st Century: The Challenge of the Recession

‘When I was packing for Greece, I thought that my MBA from Harvard would allow me to easily find a good job in Athens, something like the chief executive officer or, at least, the project manager in a large firm.’ Georgia, who is now 47, moved from Boston to Greece in the mid-1990s, following her Greek husband. Since then, she has been helping her father-in-law with their family poultry business in a small Greek city, switching between the duties of their family-owned shop assistant and that of the housewife. Her co-national Vicky, who had grown up in Washington DC and received the law degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), also moved to Southern Europe as a marriage-migrant to reunite with her Italian husband in Rome in the late 1990s and to discover eventually that she ‘has always been no more than a housewife’ there. Like Georgia, she admits, ‘It was not only the new language that I had to master. It was everything: the children, the in-laws, the local economy and the growing corruption. Many doors were closed for me from the very beginning.’ A former business executive from California, Odette, who arrived in Greece only five years ago and who has been unemployed all this time, concludes, ‘It is both very funny and sad to see that our American degrees have not been really demanded here.’

American Women in Southern Europe: A New Source of High-Skill Workforce for the Eurocrisis Zone

The current financial crisis has affected the world not equally, having divided it into relatively safe and extremely shaky segments. Its epicentre, or the ‘eurocrisis zone’, is uniformly associated with Southern Europe — the region that has been recently hit not only financially and economically but also socio-politically, with a lot of damage to its social fabric (Gatopoulos 2014; 2014; Halkias 2013). Particularly in Greece, people have lost their jobs, become desperate and committed suicide at unprecedented rates. Some live in poverty while others leave for other 2014; economically safer 2014; countries and continents and send remittances on which their families may somehow survive back home (Halkias 2013).

High-skill migration and recession : gendered perspectives

PART I: FEMALE HIGH SKILL MIGRATION: CONCEPTS AND DYNAMICS 1. Introduction. Female High Skill Migration in the 21st Century: The Challenge of the Recession Irina Isaakyan Anna Triandafyllidou 2. European Policies to Attract Talent: The Crisis and Highly Skilled Migration Policy Changes Lucie Cerna Mathias Czaika 3. Female High Skilled Emigration from Southern Europe and Ireland After the Crisis Anna Triandafyllidou Carmen Gonzalez-Enriquez 4. Crisis and Beyond: Intra-EU Mobility of Polish and Spanish Migrants in a Comparative Perspective Pawel Kaczmarczyk Mikolaj Stanek PART II: FEMALE HIGH SKILL MIGRATION: A SECTOR-SPECIFIC APPROACH 5. Migration of Nurses and Doctors in the European Union and the European Free Trade Association Gilles Dussault James Buchan Isabel Craveiro 6. Migration of Engineers and the Gender Dimension Matthew Dixon 7. Southern European Highly Skilled Female Migrants in Male-Dominated Sectors in Times of Crisis: A Look into the IT and Engineering Sectors Ruby Gropa Laura Bartolini 8. International Students Mobility, Gender Dimension and Crisis Marta Moskal 9. Exploring the Intersecting Impact of Gender and Citizenship on Spatial and Academic Career Mobility Kyoko Shinozaki PART III: PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS: TOWARDS A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF THE FEMALE HIGH-SKILL MIGRANT IN EUROPE 10. The Problem Of Skill Waste Among Highly Skilled Migrant Women In The UK Care Sector Sondra Cuban 11. American Women in Southern Europe: A New Source of High Skill Workforce for the Eurocrisis Zone Irina Isaakyan 12. Re-Thinking the Gender Dimension of High Skill Migration Anna Triandafyllidou Irina Isaakyan