Care and Migration. International Conference ****************************************************************************************** * Petra Ezzeddine ****************************************************************************************** Klíčová slova care, migration, globalization, female migrants, citizenship CARE AND MIGRATION International Conference, Goethe University and Cornelia Goethe Centrum in Frankfurt. 23rd Frankfurt, Germany. Working woman are traveling the globe as never before. Each year millions leave their home families in Third World countries for jobs in homes and nurseries and as babysitters of th Kofman (1999) estimates 1 million legal migrant workers in homes of the EU countries. The be seen especially in those countries where the labor market of public childcare and care or handicapped does not suffice (for example, Germany, Italy, Great Britain etc). This dem with the ageing of the European population, changes in the family structures and with the new social and cultural lifestyles. Women, for instance, leave their home for work because this as the only way to sustain their family. The international conference Care and Migration at the Goethe University in Frankfurt brou experts from different disciplines in the field of care and migration. The conference was renowned American author Arlie Hochschild, who gave the keynote lecture Global Traffic, Fe and Emotional Life: the case of Nannies and Surrogates. Sociologists, anthropologists and examined the impact of the reproductive crisis on receiving countries while also shedding impact on sending countries. Relevant issues included: new conditions of domestic and care impact of the financial crisis on social reproduction, the debate on paid care and citizen transnational care relations. Organizers focused on the following questions: "Who takes ca and the old, disabled people and people who need care on a daily basis? Who shops, cooks a cares?" Despite certain difficulties, the participants of the conference defined domestic work as involves processes necessary for sustentation and reproduction of human life, i.e., among so-called reproduction service and domestic chores. The theoretician of globalization Sass that paid domestic work is not regarded by migrants as the worst type of jobs, particularl into account that female migrants do mainly "dead-end jobs"; they rather consider it as a is not perceived as real work though and the research shows that when it becomes paid work well respected as before (Sotelo, 1994). Domestic workers are considered to be the most en of migrants regarding the threat of violence. A crucial problem in the position of migrant inequality which was critically reflected upon at the conference many times. The lecture given by the above-mentioned Arlie Hochschild, the author of famous sociology The Time Bind, The Second Shift and Global Woman, was an important and keenly awaited cont conference. Apart from other reasons, Hochschild also became famous for introducing the te chain which captures the hierarchical outsourcing of care that involves several tiers of w domestics or female relatives in the global South at the bottom, international migrant dom workers in the middle of the "chain," and their female employers in the North at the upper At the Frankfurt conference, Hochschild compares Filipinas who leave their families to car children and elderly of the 1st world with Indian surrogate mothers who bear children in I in the 1st world. As Hochschild argued: "Both are pursuing private rescue strategies in th public answers to their needs at the cost of facing great emotional challenges." She spoke lines around their intimate lives in global times," which she calls the globalization of t She pointed out the importance of asking about the exact nature of this kind of emotional in babysitters and surrogates. However, I absolutely do not agree with her claim that the inequality between an Indian su and her client can be leveled out when both parties consider the carrying of the baby to t giving birth to the baby for money as some kind of an exchange or a gift. Ursula Apitzsch of Goethe University in Frankfurt examined in her paper Care, Migration, a Order transnational spaces as topographies of typical biographical trajectories of migrant These trajectories are constituted and they are being continuously reconstructed by the ph transnational border-crossing activities in order to supply the rich countries with care w countries of the global periphery. I believe that it's essential for the research of transnational families to understand the in globalization: globalization makes migrants live parallel lives which, in turn, acceler globalization itself. Transnational families can thus perfectly exemplify the politics of receiving society profits from migrants' minimized needs and from the high volume of migra (Parrenas, 2001). The receiving countries support migrants on low wages who work in transn families because they don't have to be responsible for migrants' reproduction. Helma Lutz & Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck of Goethe University in Frankfurt then demonstrated th transnational families on their research findings (from biographical and depth interviews) their The "care chain" concept under scrutiny which focused on the management of the care migrant women working in Germany and Ukrainian care migrants working in Poland. The resear the following questions: "How is care arranged for children and elderly family members who What does transnational mothering mean for the children (partners, elderly parents, etc.) practical and in emotional terms?" Lutz and Pallenga-Mollönbeck made an attempt to classify new types of family and care that grandparents and even more distant relatives take on reproduction activities of Polish wom left their country. They pointed out the important role of new technologies (namely mobile Internet) in communication between the members of transnational families. These technologi "updating" of family relations. They also interestingly analyzed the public and media disc the public opinion on "bad mothers": migrants who leave their children ("social orphanism" media) in order to work abroad. The conference, however, didn't stay only on the theoretical ground of research presentati Many contributions promoted the activistic stream of feministicly orientated sociology. Ut University of Bremen (the author of "Gender and Citizenship in Western Europe") analyzed f of today by conceptualizing the provision of care as a central hinge of gender justice and the framing of social rights to include family and domestic rights and obligations. She tr discourses on care and citizenship in order to give reasons for a model of women and men a and carers. Gerhard inveighed against gender inequalities that, according to her, develop not sufficiently participate in childcare and domestic work. She argues that the neolibera of work-and-home management forces "Western" women to procure a childminder. It's the wome who have to leave their own children due to the bad economical situation to look after som children (Hochschild coins the term "alternative loving" here). The participants in the conference agreed on a more resolute solution of the given situati rather vague level, I dare say: by activism, by pushing "Western" countries towards increa aid to the developing and so?called "pink" countries (whose GDP is for the major part base of female domestic workers), e.g. the Philippines, by improving the legal status of female particularly in the EU countries, by supporting the development of NPOs that liaise with d etc. As many authors of the presentations work as consultants in European institutions and actively with international organizations and NPOs its more likely that they will find mor solution to this problem. Conference Contributions by Ursula Apitzsch, Margrit Brückner, Birgit Geissler, Ute Gerhar Inowlocki, Karin Jurczyk, Juliane Karakayali, Maria Kontos, Helma Lutz, Ewa Palenga-Möllen Rerrich, Helen Schwenken, Marianne Schmidbaur, Kyoko Shinozaki, Helen Schwenken, Gabriele Young. Petra Ezzeddine [ URL "LM-144.html "]