This seminar is organized as part of the course Migration and Labour Market Integration, within the Swedish Rearch Council´s Research School in Migration and Integration, but is open for everyone to attend.
Labour migrations have been at the forefront of gender and migration studies since the 1980s and have tended to focus on certain low skilled sectors, such as domestic and care labour, whose workers represent the emblematic figures of globalised migrations and which have driven theorisations such as the global chain of care, largely based on South-North flows. In this presentation I will raise questions about the preoccupation with women filling low skilled sectors and the relative lack of attention paid to male migrants within a broader understanding of the gendered division of migrant labour. I also suggest we should place gendered migrant labour within wider migratory flows, encompassing other categories such as family, student and refugee. While those who arrive under these categories often encounter restrictions in entering the labour market, they make significant contributions. Individuals may move between and deploy different categories in seeking to obtain their objectives, exemplifying the entangled nature of migratory flows. Other general developments in migration studies, such as the call for greater equality in the production of knowledge, have implications for the analysis of gendered labour migrations where we should recognise the significance of labour transfers beyond the commonly studied North-South. Finally we should consider methodological issues in studying the global transfer and stratification of gendered migrant labour.
Eleonore Kofman is Professor of Gender, Migration and Citizenship, at Middlesex University of London, co-Director of the Social Policy Research Centre, co-cluster lead of the Migration, Policy and Society research cluster. as well as joint co-ordinator of a newly formed University Migration Network consisting of Anglia Ruskin, Greenwich and Middlesex Universities. She is also active in international networks, for example IMISCOE, the largest network of institutions of migration research in Europe, where she is a member of the Executive Board. She was Joint Editor in Chief of the British Sociological Association journal Work, Employment and Society 2018-2021.
She has served on a number of research evaluation panels for the ESRC, Norwegian Research Council Expert Panel 2019; 2020; 2021, Czech Academy of Science: Social Science Evaluation 2021, the Belgian French Community Research Evaluation 2023-2025, AHRC 2025 and Nordforsk 2025 as well as reviewing ERC proposals.
In her research, she focuses on Gender and Migration, especially in relation to theory and policies in family and labour migration.