Social reproduction and migration

Essay and oral presentations

This course aims to provide an overview of the theoretical and empirical foundations of gender, labour, and social reproduction through a migration lens. Drawing on empirical studies from both the Global North and the Global South, it examines how the intersection of social factors such as gender, race/ethnicity, age, and class shapes working life and economic structures, as well as the relationship between the spheres of production and social reproduction.

The course is divided into seven sessions. Following an introductory lecture on theories of social reproduction and the connections between social reproduction, care crises, and migration, the course focuses on how structural changes in both sending and receiving societies generate transnational care chains linking the Global North and the Global South. Attention is also paid to spaces of work and social reproduction, including dormitories, live-in domestic work, and everyday practices of survival.

Processes of digitalisation are also central to this debate, as they function as infrastructures of social reproduction and may contribute to further forms of racialisation in the domestic work sector. In addition, digitalisation will be examined in relation to the social reproduction practices of transnational workers. Contentious labour organising is another topic addressed in the course, with particular attention to domestic workers’ strikes as a form of political action.

Finally, the course advances debates on racialised and stratified social reproduction through the study of unaccompanied migrant children's trajectories, highlighting how children themselves can become part of family survival strategies.

Alberti, G., & Sacchetto, D. (2024). The politics of migrant labour: exit, voice, and social reproduction. Policy Press.

Alberti, G., Riedner, L., & Lonergan, G. (2025). Migration and Social Reproduction: Critical Junctions between Labour, Border and Reproductive Struggles.

Farris, S. R. (2015). Migrants' regular army of labour: gender dimensions of the impact of the global economic crisis on migrant labor in Western Europe. The Sociological Review, 63(1), 121-143.

Kofman, E. (2012). Rethinking care through social reproduction: Articulating circuits of migration. Social politics, 19(1), 142-162.

Lutz, H. (2011). The new maids: Transnational women and the care economy. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Marchetti, S. (2022). Migration and domestic work. Springer.

Ruhs, M., & Anderson, B. (Eds.). (2012). Who needs migrant workers?: labour shortages, immigration, and public policy. Oxford University Press