Posted on Wednesday 23rd January 2013
Migrant Domestic Workers in Europe: The Employers’ Perspective
(provisional title)
Sabrina Marchetti and Anna Triandafyllidou (eds).
Call for Papers
Deadline for long abstracts 1 April 2013
Focus of the book and main research questions
During the last fifteen years, a rich and articulated debate around the topic of paid domestic and care labour has developed in the international academia. Several scholars have investigated phenomena taking place in the increasing number of households that employ migrants in order to perform tasks related to the care of the house, of children, elderly and other dependent persons. In so doing, the debate on domestic and care work has intertwined broad research fields as those on welfare, ageing and family, on gender, race/ethnicity and inequality, and finally on globalisation and migration regimes.
However, in the developments of this debate, the figure of employers has remained somehow unexplored. Employers’ role is continuously called into question as they are, in a sense, always present - being a fundamental actor in the labour relationship itself. Yet, the elaboration on employers still lays behind, in comparison to the flourishing of studies on employees. A thorough study on the figure of employer would be a crucial contribution not only to the specific debate on domestic and care work, but more in general for the understanding of the transformation taking place among middle class households in Europe vis-à-vis the transformations in the organisation of families and in public/private welfare, in relation to the regulations pertaining to migrant work.
In this belief, this volume aims at drawing attention at the figure of the ‘employers’ as an object of study by itself, given the complexity of their profile and the dynamics associated to their position within the household.
For more information see the call for papers .