GENDER, FAMILY AND MIGRATION

The course has two main goals:
1) to place gendered international migration processes in a historical and comparative perspective;
2) to analyze how care, employment and migration regimes as well as micro practices give shape to and have consequences for women’s migration;

Given this premise, the course contributes to an advanced understanding and to the development of analytical abilities of complex social phenomena such as the intertwining of migration, social policy and gender.
The social scientific, namely sociological, thoretical and analytical tools provided in the course are useful to disentangle the problems at the core of the course, and that can be further applied to the analysis of other compex social phenomena.

At the end of the course, students are:
- able to work with concepts and paradigms of migration necessary to understand the complexity of past and contemporary international migration process;
- familiar with different configurations of women’s migration across Europe and the world
- are aware of the role of (social, employment, migration) policies in structuring (female) migration and the specific position of (women) migrants in society, also in relation to the international division of work;
- able to deconstruct social representations and stereotypes about migrant women's status
- can tale a critical standpoint with respect to theories and political discourses explaining women inequalities as ethnic, cultures and/or religious .
- are able to orally present and discuss problems related to gender and migration based on knowledge and critical appraisal of the recent literature on the topic;
- are able to analyze, in writing, a specific problem related to gendered migration based on the most important theoretical approaches in the field and on research evidence.

No specific pre-conditions for attending the course

The course reviews, compares and critically discusses theories and concepts that analyse the processes underlying women’s migration and the impact these have on migrant men and women and their economic, social, political and civil status in home and destination countries, as well as on societies at large.

The course starts with a brief historical reconstruction of female migration that put current debate in perspective. The theory of care chains is then critically discussed and the core of the course focusses on the link between social institutions, namely employment, care and migration regimes, and the forms taken by women’s. Finally, the course addresses the impacts of different forms and contexts of migration on gender, class and generational relations.

Books:
Kofman Eleonore, Phizacklea Annie, Raghuram Parvati, and Sales Rosemary (2000) Gender and international migration in Europe: employment, welfare and politics. London, Routledge.
Parreñas Rhacel Salazar (2005) Children of global migration. Transnational families and gendered woes, Stanford (Calif.), Stanford University Press.
Slany Krystyna, Kontos, Maria, Liapi Maria (Eds) (2010) Women in New Migrations. Current Debates in European Societies, Cracow, Jagiellonian University Press.

Articles and chapters (provisional list):
Da Roit B., Weicht B. (2013) Migrant care work and care, migration and employment regimes: A fuzzy-set analysis, Journal of European Social Policy, 23(5): 469-486.
Pedraza S. (1991) Women and Migration: The Social Consequences of Gender, Annual Review of Sociology, 17: 303-325.
Schrover M. (2014) Gender and Migration in a Historical Perspective, EUI, Florence.
The complete list of articles and book chapters will follow.

The examination consists of two parts:
- an individual paper (written in English or in Italian) to be submitted at the end of the course (80% of the final grade)
- an oral presentation (in couples or small groups depending on the number of participants (20% of the final grade)

The course consist of ten sessions organized as follows:
- eight meetings with lectures and student presentations. The students are expected to actively participate, prepare for class by reading the literature and preparing their presentations and contribute to in-class discussion.
- two sessions devoted to preparing, giving and receiving feedback on the individual papers.
Depending on the number of students, the organization of the sessions could slightly be changed.

Italian

Students are required to attend all class meeting.

The course requires that the students thoroughly read the literature assigned for each week and actively participate in class.

The main language of the course is English. However, students are allowed to give their presentations and submit their papers in Italian.

Some of the course books might not be immediately available: it is important to book them well ahead of time.

written and oral