Pioneering Migration: Eastern European Women Migrants and the Struggle for the New Self

Speaker: Martina Cvajner, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, Trento University, Italy

What happens when many middle-aged, educated women – most of them mothers or even grandmothers – see the last remnants of their previous lives destroyed by the umpteenth economic crisis? When they migrate alone to an area with no previous history of immigration from their lands? When the only job open to them (live-in care work for elderly people) is felt to be stigmatizing?

Based on a decade long ethnographic project with a group of Eastern European women pioneers working in Northern Italy, the presentation shows how settlement triggers, through a variety of mundane paths, a deep transformation of their Selves.