In my postdoctoral research project, I examined how migrant domestic workers deal with questions around reproductive life in Singapore. Based on observations and interviews with domestic workers and key actors relevant for domestic workers' reproductive life and participation in the city, I analyse how practices and social relations between individual and institutional actors shape domestic workers'  reproductive lives, transnational mobility and their access to resources in the city. Drawing on 'rights to the city' and 'urban citizenship' approaches, I explore how domestic workers claim rights in the city and in this sense, manage urban space by themselves and for themselves.  

Funded by the SNSF 01/2018 – 06/2019 http://p3.snf.ch/Project-174841

Brokering labour migration: The role of home care agencies in the migration of live-in care workers in Switzerland

My PhD research focuses on the recent emergence of private for-profit home care businesses in Switzerland. These care agencies recruit circulary migrating women from the European Union accession states and place them as temporary live-in care workers in private households. Based on participatory observation, qualitative interviews and informal conversations with care agents, recruiters, care workers, unionists, government officials, I explored how migration of live-in care workers to Switzerland is facilitated. In form of a ’mobile ethnography’, I traced the journey of migrant care workers from Eastern European countries to Switzerland and the practices and infrastructures that enable their movements. I portray care workers as active agents in this journey with the power to access desirable working arrangements. Moreover my research gives glimpses into the importance of carers employments in improving their families’ lives with their income, but also induce shifts in gender relations and care responsibilities in their home villages. 

I argue that these agencies contribute to the production of new migration infrastructures tailored to live-in care workers circular mobility patterns. This infrastructure intersects with existing work, gender and care regimes and works in ways that it encloses migrant care workers in their journeys, in the households and ensures their return home after an assignment. In this sense, home care agencies play a key role in the production and maintenance of a flexible and transnational workforce in the live-in care market. Hence, the findings point to fundamental changes in migration control with the extension of the free movement of workers in Switzerland to lower-wage countries in Eastern Europe. Not only has it granted workers more rights to move freely for work, but private actors such as home care agencies have gained new powers in determining who and under which conditions workers migrate. Whereas labour migration control largely took place at physical borders before the liberalisation of migration admission within the EU- and EFTA states, it has now shifted to less visible borders, such as around the live-in care labour market.  

Funded by the SNSF 09/2013 – 12/2017 http://p3.snf.ch/Project-146551