Gender and Global Labour Migrations: Incorporating Skilled Workers

Female labour migration has increased in the past two decades, and has become more complex and interconnected, attracting considerable attention from researchers and policy makers. Earlier debates on the relationship between production and reproduction have resurfaced in a period of changing configurations of welfare states; contemporary theorisations of global labour migration are now paying attention to the role of women in the reproductive sector. However, much of the literature has focused on migrants who enter the lesser‐skilled sectors, in particular domestic labour. In this paper we argue that the migration of women into skilled sectors of the labour market, especially in health, alters our understanding of the role of migrant women in social reproduction. Migrant women are present in multiple sites and spheres of reproduction beyond the household and recognising the different ways in which they are incorporated into globalised labour markets challenges simplistic representations of migrant women and draws out a fuller appreciation of their contribution to social reproduction and welfare in the First World.     

Race and feminist care ethics: intersectionality as method

Gender has been the privileged optic through which care ethics has been theorised. However, a long line of theorists has argued that gender intersects with other vectors such as race, class and disability in the social world, including in caring practices. This paper contributes to the emergent literature on intersectionality and care ethics by focusing on how racialised difference affects care practices and therefore care ethics. It focuses on competence and alterity, and recognition and communication, as two elements that point to how racialised care is risky. It argues that slavery and colonialism have underpinned racial hierarchies marking contemporary racialised care encounters. As a result, racially marked people’s skills are often undervalued and their competency questioned even as race becomes an increasingly important difference between who cares and who receives care. Secondly, racial hierarchies in who gets care and what that care looks like can make care so distinctive as to be unrecognisable both to the care giver and those who need care. Lack of care is as productive of subjectivities as care so that care needs simply may not be articulated. Finally, given these differences in what care means, caring can become risky. The paper concludes by suggesting that thinking through intersectionality as method allows us to focus on moments and events where care can become unsettled. Care ethics should learn not only from its successes but also from instances when care has failed. We need a feminist care ethics that responds to the distance and difference that race brings to care. That is the promise of good care.