Before and after Migration: Vietnamese Families’ Changing Family Lives and Care Arrangements with Czech Nannies

SOURALOVÁ, Adéla. Before and after Migration: Vietnamese Families’ Changing Family Lives and Care Arrangements with Czech Nannies. In 10th Conference of the European Sociological Association, Geneva, Switzerland. 2011.

Základní údaje

• Originální název: Before and after Migration: Vietnamese Families’ Changing Family Lives and Care Arrangements with Czech Nannies
• Název anglicky: Before and after Migration: Vietnamese Families’ Changing Family Lives and Care Arrangements with Czech Nannies
• Autoři: SOURALOVÁ, Adéla.
• Vydání: 10th Conference of the European Sociological Association, Geneva, Switzerland, 2011.

Další údaje

• Typ výsledku: Prezentace na konferencích
• Utajení: není předmětem státního či obchodního tajemství
• Organizační jednotka: Fakulta sociálních studií

Anotace

Vietnamese families in the Czech Republic often pay Czech women to care for their children. My ongoing research seeks to develop a holistic understanding of this phenomenon in the context of contrasting arrangements in the pre-migratory and post-migratory organization of family lives. There are four crucial interrelated dimensions. First, being mostly labour migrants, parents of small children need to intensively participate in the labour market and find ways of balancing work and family lives. Second, different care practices in the Czech Republic compared to the experiences of Vietnamese migrants from their homeland that – together with working hours mentioned above – make the paying for caregiver “normal” for Vietnamese families, but simultaneously “abnormal” or incomprehensible for Czech caregivers themselves. Third, this leads to the competition of different ideologies of mothering between Czech women having their own experiences of mothering and the actual mothering by Vietnamese mothers. And finally, the changes in the family structure after migration (uprooting from the extensive kinship that the care can be delegated on) result in finding a “substitute” grandmother and developing a fictive kin with her and her family to simulate the family arrangements intimately known from Vietnam. The paper will discuss the case of majority women working as caregivers for migrant families in the context of the established social science knowledge about the care-migration-labour market triad. Using intersectional approach, I will explore how interlocking social divisions (notably gender, ethnicity, migrancy and body) create specific mothering strategies in the context of the employer-employee relationship and ethnicity based hierarchies.