One Family, Two Households: Rural to Urban Migration in Kenya

Many households in sub-Saharan Africa allocate their labor resources between rural and urban areas to diversify risks and maximize income. One such strategy would be for a husband in a rural area to migrate to an urban area while his wife and family remain in the rural area without any chance of joining the migrant husband in the urban area. The family maintains a rural home and an urban home. This article explores possible determinants of this type of migration using data from Kenya. Nontrivial findings suggest that such migratory behavior may be motivated by agglomeration effects of household size in the rural area, an increase in remittance by the migrant husband to his rural family, a relatively low education for the husband, and a high urban cost of living.     

Migration,insecurity and identity: The Nepali dairymen in India's Northeast

The migration of the Nepalis to Northeast India for cattle grazing and dairy farming since the last years of the nineteenth century evolved as a mainstay of later Nepali migrations in the twentieth century. It is significant that this group of migrants enjoyed active colonial patronage, along with the labourers and Gurkha soldiers in the army, but was among the first to face the impact of changing colonial land and taxation policies. Government policies of exclusion and nativist attitudes in post-independence India caused them considerable insecurity about their status in the region. This paper highlights the evolution of the Nepali dairy farmers as an important economic group within the larger group of Nepali migrants in Northeast India, and looks at the issues that led to a redefinition of their relations in the host country and articulations for reassertion/or search for an identity in India.     

Father's Migration and Leaving the Parental Home in Rural Mozambique

Migration is an increasingly common global phenomenon and has important implications for the well‐being of family members left behind. Although extensive research has examined the impact of parental labor migration on school‐age children, less is known about its effect on adolescents. In this study, the authors used longitudinal survey data collected in rural Mozambique (N = 515) to assess the association between father's migration and adolescent children's leaving the parental home, an important component of the transition to adulthood. The results showed that father's migration delays home‐leaving for adolescent girls and that these effects are not mediated by school enrollment. The results for boys were inconclusive. The authors also found that remittances and longer durations of paternal migration were negatively associated with the transition out of the home. On the basis of the findings, they argue that father's migration delays girls' marriage.     

Gendered Violence and Politics in Indigenous Communities

This article examines the depoliticization of violence against women in indigenous communities. It argues that there is a pressing need to examine the ways in which gendered violence is explained, addressed and often sanctioned in indigenous communities. The article draws on Crenshaw's concept of political intersectionality and examines responses to gendered violence in indigenous communities through two groups: Aboriginal women in Canada and Sámi women in Scandinavia.     

Managing Migration,Managing Motherhood: The Moral Economy of Gendered Migration

For the past two decades, women have been migrating from Mexico to the United States on temporary work visas to pick meat from blue crabs in small coastal factories. Within a theoretical framework that argues for the relevance of a moral economic perspective to gendered migration, we examine the how participating in this migration influences migrants' families, including their abilities to produce higher‐quality lives. Specifically, we focus on the various factors that feed into the decision to migrate, the immediate consequences of those decisions for the relations among migrants, children, spouses and other family and community members, and the longer‐term consequences in terms of gender relations, the restructuring of parent–child relationships and the material benefits of work abroad. We find that women negotiate a variety of contradictions and paradoxes to participate in the programme, many of which directly influence their quest to reaffirm their abilities, as mothers, to produce quality human beings. These findings reflect more general global appeals for valuing human life by measures other than those of conventional political economy.     

Becoming Red Thread Women: Alternative Visions of Gendered Politics in Post-independence Guyana

This essay argues that the rise of Guyana's Red Thread Women's Development Organisation in the mid-1980s was precipitated by the establishment of a hegemonic political culture through the regime of President Forbes Burnham. Utilizing both Aldon Morris's (1992, 2001) notion of 'opppositional consciousness' and Raka Ray's (1999) typology of 'political fields' the author finds that the founding members of Red Thread were engaged in a struggle to redefine the political culture in Guyana. Through its mobilization of women across the divides of race/ethnicity, class, religion, and geography, Red Thread was a key site for rethinking the nature of the political structure for women's politics and women's empowerment. The essay places the emergence of Red Thread within a critical review of Guyanese women's mobilization and organization in trade union movements and women's auxiliaries to established political parties through the Colonial and post-Colonial eras.     

Religiously Motivated Migration

Self‐interested motives are typically assumed when addressing migration causation. However, values, such as those from religion, can also motivate migration. This study develops a theoretical framework of religiously motivated migration. Inasmuch as values are derived from and reinforced within groups, religions with strong cohesion are more likely to act on one of three value‐based religious migration motivations: sacred command, context conducive for religious practice, and awareness of potential membership losses from competition. This theoretical framework is demonstrated through Amish‐Mennonite migration. Generalizability is suggested from a brief review of the Puritans, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, and Russian Mennonites.     

Evaluating Climate Migration

Climate change will negatively impact human communities and ecosystems, including driving increased food insecurity, increased exposure to disease, loss of livelihood and worsening poverty. Recent climate debates have focused attention on climate migrants, people who are displaced by the ecological stresses caused by climate change. To date, these debates have focused a great deal of attention on state security issues and have left the gender implications largely unexplored. In this article we examine the securitization of climate migration debates through gender lenses. We find that gender helps reveal and focus attention on the human security implications of climate migration and offers a useful discourse for climate policymaking.     

Gendered perceptions of power and decision‐making in rural Kenya

Development policies and programmes rest on assumptions about what constitutes power and how to change power dynamics. However, they rarely consider local understandings of power. In this article we ask how these common assumptions correspond with socially and culturally specific ideas about what power is, who can hold power, and how power can be transferred, in rural communities in Kenya's lake region. We find that men and women are constantly negotiating for power in the household, within the bounds of their gendered limitations. And the predominant zero‐sum conception of power may undermine common development approaches to empowerment. However, the results also highlight some exceptions to this conceptualization, as well as the value of taking a whole‐family approach to empowerment.     

Global Changes and Gendered Responses: The Feminization of Migration From Georgia

While frequently discussed, the feminization of migration remains among the least understood trends in migration literature. Existing research links feminization of migration to socioeconomic change in migrant origin countries, changes in destination‐country labor markets, structural factors, and changing social attitudes. However, questions of how the feminization of migration begins and how it becomes socially institutionalized remain largely unanswered. Having experienced a recent, dramatic increase in female migration, Georgia provides an excellent case to study the emergence of women's labor migration. Our findings highlight the importance of human capital, increasing divorce rates, and an absence of local economic opportunities in motivating increasing numbers of women to migrate. Additionally, changing destination patterns and shifts in labor‐market demand toward feminized occupations act as key initial conditions enabling the growth of women's migration. As migration is feminized, cultural beliefs stigmatizing female migrants can be renegotiated to frame women's migration within normative gender approaches, providing pathways for cultural maintenance. In the early stages of the feminization of migration, we find the initial attempts to reframe migration are powerful; they can challenge, or at least delay, the expansion of women's autonomy that is often associated with migration.     

New Global Politics of Reproductive Labor: Gendered Labor and Marriage Migration

The feminization of international migration nowadays has demonstrated a new global politics of reproductive labor (work necessary for the reproduction of families). This paper reviews recent studies that manifest similarity, affinity, and continuity across multiple forms of reproductive labor carried out by migrant women in four aspects. First, the recruitment of women as foreign maids or foreign brides provides class‐specific parallel strategies to the global care crisis. Second, paid and unpaid forms of reproductive labor constitute intersecting circuits of labor and marriage migration through which women partake in continuous migration. Third, various categories of migrant women are discursively conflated and attached to similar images as sexualized others. Finally, global care chains not only involve migrant reproductive labor conducted at home but also operate on the level of social reproduction as indicated by the expansion of international nursing migration.     

Towards the elsewhere: discourses on migration and mobility practices between Morocco and Italy

The objective of this article is to analyse the preparation process of young Moroccan migrants intended to migrate to Italy. My focus is on the personal and collective formulation of their desire to leave and on concomitant action taken to bring about these aspirations; highlighting the complexity of the imagination, which migration – and expected return – entails. A second point of interest is the agency exerted by such youth, as they prepare for departure; even when they have not yet physically left the country. In addition, my observation is focussed on networks emerging as a result of having to deal with state-imposed, migration restrictions, as well as with the politics of humanitarian agencies and NGOs. I argue that these aspiring migrants project themselves into the future and act in accordance with what they long to become. They shape themselves as mobile subjects through a process of self-making to overcome the above-mentioned constraints.     

Migration and the senses

Recent scholarship in the sociological subfields of culture and immigration offers several promising directions for studying how people experience the world in embodied ways and move through and across boundaries. Yet, the lack of overlap between fields has left numerous theoretical angles unexplored. In this review, I consider the limited existing scholarship at the intersection of migration and the senses. I discuss literature on the role of sensation during three critical moments of migration: movement, encounter, and return. These moments highlight the sensorially dislocating nature of travel, the felt politics of inclusion and exclusion, and the transporting power of embodied memories. These works dive deep into the everyday realities of bodies on the move that public and academic discourse has previously ignored. I conclude by briefly outlining exciting new directions to expand work connecting migration and the senses and suggest that we begin to explore globalized migrant sensibilities.     

A Gendered Analysis of the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Contemporary South Africa

This article argues that African working class households are the sites of a crisis of social reproduction in contemporary South Africa. Through a gendered analysis of five townships in Emnambithi the article demonstrates that African working class women are the shock absorbers of this crisis. While feminist scholars point to a growing crisis of social reproduction as a global phenomenon, the South African material illustrates how poor women experience this in the South.     

Labour Migration and Competitiveness in the European Union

The study is about the characteristics and phenomena of the labour migration that fluxes from, through, and into the East Central European region. The typical groups of migrant workers are emphasized, like the qualified employees, the commuters, the illegal workers, or the migrants according to the family's income optimization. The brain drain is analyzed as a problem of the absence of experts in the region. The tools and possibilities of migration policy are discussed, too, to find suggestions for the state how to turn the direction of migration to the desired way. Through this topic, the countries of destination are introduced with the competitive position of the eastern migrants. The study also reflects on the problem of asymmetric flux of labour out of the region.     

Gendered experiences of physical restraint on locked wards for women

Physical restraint is used in inpatient services for people with intellectual disabilities as a way of holding a person to avoid injury. This article uses data from an ethnographic study in a locked unit in the north of England to explore women’s experiences of physical restraint using a feminist disability studies analysis. Data consists of field notes as well as interviews with 16 of the women who had experienced restraint, and 10 staff who worked with them. The women gave insights into the gendered phenomenon of restraint in light of their past experiences of violence. The authors argue that restraint is used with women to encourage passivity at times when more relational and therapeutic methods could be used. The article offers recommendations for alternative strategies that services can encourage.     

Intimate Communication across Borders: Spousal Labor Migration and Recent Partner Communication about Family Planning in Nepal

Abstract

Amid widespread labor migration in Nepal, spousal separation may affect partner communication about intimate topics like family planning. We examined the association between spousal migration experience and partner communication about family planning using survey responses from 1,793 married Nepali women (ages 18–49 years) with a child under 5 years. More than 60% of women had recently migrating spouses. Forty-seven percent reported recent partner communication about family planning. Women with currently migrating spouses were significantly less likely than women with non-migrant spouses to report recent spousal discussions about family planning. Recent partner communication about family planning varied by destination and duration of current migration. Future programs designed to fulfill the reproductive health needs of transregional or transnational couples should address partner communication about family planning.     

Trust Networks in Transnational Migration

The sheer volume of migrant remittances to relatively poor countries, including those of Latin America and the Caribbean, nicely dramatizes the genuinely transnational social ties created by long-distance migration. The evidence underlines that migration flows are serious business, not only for the individuals and families involved, but also for whole national economies. Thinking about remittances also allows us to identify some crucial social processes of which most migrants and first-hand students of migration are well aware, but for which we have neither well-established theories, carefully crafted concepts, nor extensive evidence. I mean the creation, use, and transformation of interpersonal trust networks within migration streams.     

Migration and Elderly Africans in the United States

Although population movements and migration across national borders have occurred throughout human history, the accelerated pace of human migration from Africa to the United States in recent decades is unprecedented. A distinct phenomenon of this trend is that in addition to young African immigrants, an increasing number of elderly Africans are joining the ranks of immigrants in the United States. This article explores prevailing factors that may explain migration among elderly Africans in late adult life. The article addresses the unique experience of African-born elders as they age in the United States. Implications for policy and practice are also discussed.     

Tracing Differentiation in Gendered Leadership: An Analysis of Differences in Gender Composition in Top Management in Business,Politics and the Civil Service

The aim of this article is to discuss the relationship between the gendering of leadership positions and sector‐specific structures within politics, business and the civil service in Denmark in the context of differences between the Nordic countries and other western countries. The analysis is based on data from a survey of top male and female leaders within the three sectors. The theoretical point of departure of this article is constructivist. It looks at gender as constituted by actions in social space, orchestrated by structural processes and a symbolic order of gender. This constitutes a cultural discourse on gender reflected in gender conventions in society and in a range of possibilities of gender positioning. Expressions of this are discussed in the analysis of the patterns of difference in structural conditions for women and men in leadership positions to be found within the three sectors. The structural conditions encompass access conditions and conditions for gendered positioning and are analysed on the basis of data on social background, education, career course, family, children and distribution of housework. The analysis shows that there is a correlation between gender composition of leadership and possibilities of gendered positioning within a sector. The results are finally discussed as possible expressions of an egalitarian culture.