My project is titled Race, Class, and Gender of Transnational Urban Labor: Romanian Workers in the Cities of London and NYC. The central problem addressed by the project is transnational work migration, which is an important topic because migration flows continually change the structures of our lives, communities, and politics. In Britain, increased diversity has become central to dialogues about citizenship rights and responsibilities, social justice, community inclusion. These debates took a turn toward exclusionary effects during the Brexit campaigns and Brexit negotiations. In the United States, migration is also at the core of political debates, legislative reforms and shifts toward populist exclusionary discourses targeting migrants. The research sites of this project were London and NYC. Its overall objectives were: a) to analyzes the politics of immigrant labor; b) to analyze the production of racialized modes of femininity and masculinity associated with Romanian "low-skilled" and "high-skilled" labor in two centers of global capitalism.
Theoretically the project engaged with analyses of labor sectors situated within and beyond the so called low skilled feminized realms (e.g domestic or sexual work). In doing that I drew upon feminist scholarship on transnational circuits of affective labor in order to theorize the emotional dimensions associated with other discrete economic sectors governed by contemporary politics of austerity (e.g. humanitariasm and NGO work, medical services, finance and banking, education and research).
Towards this ends, qualitative data was collected: a total of 70 in depth,unstructured interviews were collected in London and NYC; a total of 900 hours of ethnographic work were conducted in neighborhoods of London and NYC; archival and newsmedia data sets.The research illuminates processes of racialization in the UK and the US reliant on modes of othering that move beyond the focus on physiological difference that figured so prominently in 19th and 20th century scientific racism. By placing discourses of work at the core of its investigations, it traces constructions of ethnicity and nationality that shift the boundaries of belonging to exclude those who fall squarely within the category "Caucasian." Furthermore, it shows modes of femininity and masculinity are rearticulated within structures of transnational class stratification and vocabularies specific to neoliberal capitalism. Presently the analysis traces the increasing racism and xenophobia promoted by neoliberalism within global cities. Finally, I seek to theorize global cities not only as spaces that produce conditions for the exploitation for gendered and racialized labor, but also as spaces that enable the formation of new politics toward labor justice, citizenship and cultural dialogue.
