Kyoko Shinozaki

Transnational dynamics in a migrant researching migrants: self-reflexivity and boundary-drawing in fieldwork

Abstract This article links migrant transnationalism with methodological debates, in particular the researchers positionalities and self-reflexivity, which have so far barely been addressed in transnational studies in any systematic manner. Drawing upon my fieldwork experience in a German city, ‘Schönberg’, it examines the process of boundary-drawing and re-drawing between the research participants and the researcher. While there is undeniably a clear power hierarchy between the two parties that originates in national belonging, other positionalities such as gender, ethnicity, class and stage in the life cycle may, at their intersection, work to reverse such an asymmetrical relationship. Boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are not static and are, rather, created in a situational manner. Thus, attending to multiple positionalities in their intersection in research processes may help the researcher to re-evaluate the naturalized primacy given to national belonging.

Introduction. Bringing gender into migration

Migrations are complex world-wide phenomena — for millennia people have moved in search of a better livelihood or political climate, have fled from persecutions and pogroms or have been displaced when new nation states were created or existing ones disintegrated. Migration patterns and processes, the experiences of migrants, as well as the social, political, economic and cultural impact of their migration are gendered. Under the influence of feminist inquiry about the position of women in society and in gender hierarchies, migration scholarship has slowly moved away from male centred universalism — a perspective in which women either remain invisible or are considered as dependents. The times when migration was considered to be an all male phenomenon, and the ‘mainstream’ was a ‘malestream,’ have been long forgone. It is now common knowledge that migrations world-wide are ‘increasingly feminised,’ a sine qua non assertion in scholarly work and in international reports on migration.

Transnational perspectives on intersecting experiences: gender, social class and generation among Southeast Asian migrants and their families

ABSTRACT This Special Issue engages two strands of scholarship in dialogue in a meaningful way: intersectionality and transnational studies. This introductory article outlines the ways in which we envision this project as a part of the ongoing process of cross-fertilisation between these two camps and build on these debates. As a step in this direction, we pay special attention to gender, social class and generation as main intersecting categories, while also considering others. These three are flexible categories rather than dogmatic ones. To this end, we critically reflect on the ‘feminisation’ of gender, proposing to expand the scope of analysis to social constructions around masculinities in relation to femininities and their experiential dimension. We will then discuss the neglect of social class and the importance of generation in the transnational migration scholarship. The introduction ends with discussing the contributions in relation to the key theme of the present Special Issue.

Family Matters: Migrant Domestic and Care Work and the Issue of Recognition

Over the past decade, studies on the issue of migrant domestic and care workers have proliferated: some have shown the regulative, institutional mechanisms, affecting this group of migrants, and others have concentrated on micro, subjective experiences of the migrants themselves. Rather than treating them in isolation from one another, this chapter aims to explore the interaction of these two levels, exploring different facets of social recognition attainment among migrant domestic and care workers in 11 European countries. The authors propose a concept of recognition, which attends to social relations in attaining recognition, whilst simultaneously incorporating a structural dimension such as policies/regulations, gendered, class, ethnic and racialized domination and stereotypes. The focus is on the family as the main locus in which this interaction is articulated. In particular, the analysis shows how tenaciously, and yet differently, the trope of the family permeates both policy and migrant women’s narratives in diverse European countries, cutting across different migration and care regimes, as well as across North-South, West-East regional differences. The authors explore the linkages between familialism (expressed in care policies) and migration regulations that generate the institutional facets of social recognition. They highlight migrant domestic workers’ and carers’ experience in their work and life and the ways in which this is linked to institutions generating or hindering social recognition.

Gender and citizenship in academic career progression: an intersectional, meso-scale analysis in German higher education institutions

ABSTRACT In tune with the fundamental shift in Germany’s skill-b(i)ased immigration policy since 2005, higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly becoming ‘magnets’ for a skilled migrant workforce. While ‘internationalisation’ is often understood as something to be celebrated and (further) accomplished, some observers speak of clear signs of discriminatory experiences among racialised and migrant academics. This is a new aspect, as social inequalities have by and large been considered in migration studies to be the sole terrain of labour mobility into less-skilled sectors of the economy. Meanwhile, abundant literature on gender and higher education shows that women academics have poorer access to career progression than men, demonstrating gender-based academic career inequalities. However, the insights generated in these two strands of scholarship have seldom been in conversation with one another. This paper takes stock of the lack of an intersectional perspective, focusing on citizenship and gender within HEIs as hiring meso-level organisations that are becoming increasingly transnationalised. It explores the intersectionality of citizenship and gender in accessing academic career advancement by examining three key career stages, that is, doctoral researchers, postdoctoral researchers, and professors, in two case-study HEIs.

Migrant Citizenship from Below

As I have increasingly become acquainted with the dynamic lives of irregular migrant domestic and care workers in Schonberg and their transnational engagement in different spheres of life, I have begun to question the common perception of them as being dually invisible and their presumed helplessness resulting from this invisibility. At the same time, to be sure, their structural positions are more than precarious and make them extremely vulnerable to exploitation. However, if we are to understand their experiences as irregular migrants working in private homes, we need to examine their ordinary lives (Bommes and Sciortino 2011a) without imposing some predetermined view “from above.” This has prompted me to conceptualize my fieldwork observations as what I refer to as “migrant citizenship from below,” viewed through a transnational and translocal lens.

Exploring the Intersecting Impact of Gender and Citizenship on Spatial and Academic Career Mobility

The above two epigraphs pinpoint just how fundamentally Germany’s official discourse about (not) being a country of immigration has changed in the matter of only a decade. Then-Minister of Interior Wolfgang Schauble repeated the long-lived, common official understanding of German nationhood as not a country of immigration, as many other politicians have done. Despite Germany’s historical experience of receiving a large number of migrants in both the distant and more recent past (Bade 2000; Hoerder 2002), his statement reaffirmed the widespread discourse that Germany has formally maintained its stance of no new labour recruitment, the principle that has been in place since the ending of its guest-worker programme in the mid-1970s (Brubaker 1992; Pries 2012; Thranhardt 1992).

Transforming a Private Home

When I was socializing with Filipina and Filipino domestic workers at weekends, it was common to get a glimpse of a heavy bundle of house keys, which they carried with them. This means that they are live-out weekly cleaners of their “part-times”—the name that Filipina and Filipino migrant domestic workers gave to their employers. This working arrangement is the most common one among my research participants in Schonberg: they clean and iron a few hours a week for each one according to a previously agreed schedule, rather than indicating their overall working hours. They are not part-time workers themselves but have several part-times a day for six days—some of them seven days—a week. At the time of the interviews, 17 (12 women and 5 men) out of 20 domestic workers lived out from their employers’ homes while the remaining 3(2 female and 1 male) migrants lived in their own apartment or room within their employer’s home. Below are quotes of two domestic workers: When we first came here [in 1989], it was very common to work for full-time. I did work for full-time for a couple of months, but when I started these part-time jobs, it was less stressful because mostly there’s nobody in there [in the house or apartment]. Or even if they are there, you have this system that they know if you are working in that place and they move to another room, things like that.

Social Activism in the Making

The preceding two chapters examined the dimension of status and the practices of migrant citizenship in irregular migration at the individual and household levels. Taking into consideration James Scott’s (1985) insight that marginalized groups tend to resort to a less coordinated form of resistance and to avoid direct, open confrontations with dominant groups,1 I have so far focused on the more individual mode of struggles of migrant citizens from the Philippines in Schonberg. While these everyday acts of resistance are the predominant forms of citizenship contestation, I have observed that new forms of engagement by migrants and their supporters—both individuals and organizations—have been emerging in specific local contexts: the role of Christian-faith-related activities, local networks enabling access to health care, and support networks for legal action by an irregular migrant care worker to demand unpaid wages. This is something that can be called “social activism,” defined as “action on behalf of a cause, action that goes beyond … conventional or routine [politics]” (Martin 2007, 19).2 Thus, this chapter zooms in on the practices of domestic workers in relation to (trans)local institutional settings as a way of negotiating their migrant citizenship, shifting the level of analysis toward the migrants’ interaction with the meso-level of communities, networks, and organizations.

Gendered Parenting across Borders

At the beginning of my fieldwork, I had not anticipated hearing about parenting experiences from my research participants. Constrained by their irregular migration status, the overwhelming majority of them have not been able to cross Germany’s borders again, once they are “in.” Much of the existing literature on transnational mothering has addressed heterogeneous groups of migrant workers, ranging from longterm Latina immigrants in California (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997), contract workers in Asia (Asis, Huang, and Yeoh 2004), temporary Filipina migrant domestic workers in Rome (Parrenas 2001), to mobile Eastern European caregivers who go back and forth between their countries of origin and Germany every few months (Morokvaisc 1994, 2003; Lutz and Palenga-Mollenbeck 2012). Despite variable degrees of spatial mobility capital among these heterogeneous groups of transnational migrant mothers, separation is common central issue. Irregular migration status is referred to in these debates. However, long-term repercussions and meanings of it have little been explored as a key condition to understand transnational lives of irregular migrant mothers and fathers. Hence, hearing about long-term migrants’ engagement in parenting from a distance via advanced telecommunication technologies and through other means was all the more surprising to me.