Projekt

A growing gendered, transnational labor market is tackling the need for senior care in the West - mainly through live-in care arrangements, under which women are impelled by unemployment and low wages in the Central Eastern European countries (CEE) including Ukraine, to take on care work, leaving care gaps behind them. This project sets out to tackle the existing research gap by focusing on the infrastructural meso-level, as the nexus that connects the receiving and the sending contexts and the level at which care is organized and professionalized transnationally. The assumption is that the increased marketization and professionalization of the previously informal transnational care work sector has an impact on national and transnational care regimes and labor markets. The project team will therefore seek to investigate the intersections between intra-EU mobility, care drain and gain within and from CEE countries and Ukraine, in order to offer lessons on how to develop sustainable and decent care work in and across Europe. The project consists of four interlinked work packages that focus on an analysis of welfare and labor market policies and regulations and build on each other. Based on a cross-thematic and cross-country comparative design, the team will use a mix of methods, which include document analysis and policy research, interviews, ethnographic observation, online surveys and participatory research in workshops. A further work package will develop theoretical synthesis and the final work package will put into practice an academic and non-academic dissemination strategy, engaging with various types of actors and including workshops, multimedia, and a documentary film. The project team brings together an interdisciplinary consortium of midcareer and junior scholars and is committed to academic capacity building and politically engaged research.

• Dr. Ewa Helena Palenga-Möllenbeck

  Universität Frankfurt am Main
  Fachbereich Sozialwissenschaften
  Institut für Soziologie
  Frankfurt am Main
  

• Dr. Petra Ezzeddine

  Charles University
  Faculty of Humanities
  Department of General Anthropology
  Prague
  Tschechische Republik
  

• Dr. Dóra Gábriel

  Eötvös Loránd Research Network
  Centre for Social Sciences
  Institute for Sociology
  Budapest
  Ungarn
  

• Dr. Oksana Dutchak

  Center for Social and Labor Research
  (CSLR)
  Kiev
  Ukraine
  

• Dr. Mihaela Haragus

  Universitatea Babes-Bolyai
  Centre for Population Studies
  Cluj-Napoca
  Rumänien