Haitian domestic worker. Alex Proimos/Flickr. (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Your areas of research include labour, migration, transnational feminism, economic sociology, gender, and the family. You have done seminal work on migrant domestic workers, including the case of Filipino domestic workers in Italy. What are the elements that characterize our time, and what has changed compared to the past in the care of houses and families?
Many scholars have observed that the emergence of dual wage earning families have intensified the outsourcing of care. Outsourcing while keeping care affordable is one challenge facing families. Thus families try to secure unpaid care, relying on friends and kin. They also rely on part-time care. Some however have to rely on full time care. Those willing to do this work for an affordable wage increasingly are immigrant women.
