This open access short reader offers a critical review of the debates on the transformation of migration and gendered mobilities primarily in Europe, though also engaging in wider theoretical insights. Building on empirical case studies and grounded in an analytical framework that incorporates both men and women, masculinities, sexualities and wider intersectional insights, this reader provides an accessible overview of conceptual developments and methodological shifts and their implications for a gendered understanding of migration in the past 30 years. It explores different and emerging approaches in major areas, such as: gendered labour markets across diverse sectors beyond domestic and care work to include skilled sectors of social reproduction; the significance of families in migration and transnational families; displacement, asylum and refugees and the incorporation of gender and sexuality in asylum determination; academic critiques and gendered discourses concerningintegration often with the focus on Muslim women. The reader concludes with considerations of the potential impact of three notable developments on gendered migrations and mobilities: Black Lives Matter, Brexit and COVID-19. As such, it is a valuable resource for students, academics, policy makers, and practitioners.
Anastasia Christou is Associate Professor of Sociology, member of the Social Policy Research Centre and founding member of the FemGenSex research network at Middlesex University, London, UK. Anastasia has engaged in multi-sited, multi-method and comparative ethnographic research in the United States, the UK, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, France, Iceland and recently in Switzerland. Anastasia has widely published research on issues of diasporas, migration and return migration; the second generation and ethnicity; space and place; transnationalism and identity; culture and memory; gender and feminism; home and belonging; emotion and narrativity; ageing/youth mobilities, care, trauma, race/racisms and intersectionalities, embodiment, sexualities, women/men/masculinities, motherhood/mothering. She is the author of “Narratives of Place, Culture and Identity: Second-Generation Greek-Americans Return 'Home'”, Amsterdam University Press (2006) and her most recent book is a jointly authored research monograph entitled, Christou, A. and King, R. “Counter-diaspora: The Greek Second Generation Returns ‘Home’”, appearing in the series Cultural Politics, Socioaesthetics, Beginnings, distributed by Harvard University Press (2015).
Eleonore Kofman is Professor of Gender, Migration and Citizenship and co-Director of the Social Policy Research Centre, Middlesex University London. She is also Visiting Professor, Institute of Global Affairs, LSE. She has conducted research and published on gender migration since the early 1990s. Within the field her interests focus on the development of gender and migration, critical analyses of labour and family migrations and the articulation between the two forms. She has co-ordinated and participated in a number of projects funded by the European Commission and research councils and foundations. Key publications include the co-authoring of Gender and International Migration in Europe: employment, welfare and politics, Routledge, 2000; Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 and the co-editing of Gender, Generations and the Family in International Migration, University of Amsterdam Press, 2011, and articles in International Migration, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Social Politics. She is a member of the IMISCOE Executive Board.
