Description du projet
Pourquoi nous devrions nous préoccuper du travail de soin domestique
Au cours des 25 dernières années, la Bosnie-Herzégovine a connu de profondes transformations responsables de vagues de migration vers l’UE, principalement vers l’Autriche. Le travail de soins rémunéré, principalement effectué par les femmes, est sous-estimé et n’est pas reconnu en tant que véritable travail. Le projet CareWork, financé par l’UE, constitue une étude anthropologique du travail de soins pour les enfants et les personnes âgées en Bosnie-Herzégovine. Le projet étudiera le travail de soins domestiques féminins informels et rémunérés en tant qu’activité relationnelle socialement productive et reproductive en interaction avec les transformations sociales plus larges intervenues dans le pays et au-delà. CareWork appliquera une méthodologie innovante consistant à retracer le travail de soins à travers différents ménages concernés par cette activité, en se concentrant sur Sarajevo et l’Autriche.
Objectif
CareWork is an anthropological study of domestic paid female care work for children and elderly persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Motivated by the global under-recognition of this essential activity as real labor and by recent global changes in its organization, my research goes beyond the almost exclusive anthropological theorization of care within kinship studies. Building on (socialist) feminist scholarly traditions on domestic work, which places care at the centre of political economy, CareWork investigates informal paid female domestic care work as a socially productive and reproductive relational activity in a dialectic relationship with broader social transformations in BiH and beyond. To enhance and fill gaps in current scholarship it uses an innovative methodology: it traces care work through ‘care clusters’ (various households differentially affected by it) and focuses on two connected sites—Sarajevo (primary site) and Austria (auxiliary site, a nearby top destination for BiH labour migration by carers)—to reconstruct the dynamics and dialectics of such work. This ethnographic study revolves around the following questions: a) How is this care work organized?; b) How does it shape up in relation to broader social processes (e.g. reconfigurations of labour and social security, of ethnonational relations, of migratory patterns) in light of processes of Europeanization?; c) What kind of effects/changes does this care work produce for the various stakeholders? In BiH global changes are particularly visible as it is marked by multiple formal—postwar, postsocialist, Europeanizing—transformations over the last 25 years. Tracing how social transformations converge in care work, CareWork affirms care as a central category of anthropological theory and demonstrates how social scientists can productively employ it as a prism for studying social transformations, as a deeply gendered node of social reproduction with retrograde and emancipatory potential.
Champ scientifique
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Régime de financement
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinateur
8010 Graz
Autriche