Gender and Migration: Education, Family and Social Mobility among Caribbean Nurses
PROJECT IS COMPLETED
Project period: January 2010 - March 2015
During the past decades there has been increasing awareness that women not only migrate as dependents to join husbands or fathers abroad, but play a central role as migrants in their own right.
So far, much of the literature has focused on migrant women who are engaged in domestic work or care work, predominant forms of employment among unskilled migrant women. Furthermore, studies have examined the problems of gender and racial discrimination associated with this type of work.
This research project focused on women who migrate for the purpose of further education. More specifically, it looked at Caribbean women who migrated to Britain during the 1950’s, 1960s and 1970’s in order to receive training in nursing.
Migration for training in nursing has offered women in the developing world an economically accessible means of qualifying for a profession. With its focus on ‘educational migration’, the project aimed to shed light on a form of physical, social and personal mobility that is poorly documented and understood, but which has an increasing impact on migration processes, not only in the Caribbean, but also more broadly speaking.
Thus, the project explored the role of this migration as a gender specific strategy that women may adopt in order to fulfil family and community obligations, pursue social mobility, and assert their own personhood and agency.
Fieldwork was based on open-ended life story interviews with:
- Nurses who have stayed in Britain.
- Nurses who returned to undertake a career in the Caribbean when they had received their credentials.
- Nurses who have spent most of their lives in Britain, but who have moved back to the Caribbean upon their retirement.
The project was linked to the project ‘Education, Mobility and Citizenship’ located at The Danish School of Education, which is one of the three departments at the Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University.
Professor emeritus Karen Fog Olwig, Department of Anthropology, UCPH
Scientific publications
Olwig, Karen Fog (2018), Female immigration and the ambivalence of dirty care work: Caribbean nurses in imperial Britain, Ethnography 19(1): 44-62.
Olwig, Karen Fog (2018), The Timescape of Post-WWII Caribbean Migration to Britain: Historical Heterogeneity as Challenge and Opportunity, pp. 43-61 in Migration, Temporality, and Capitalism: Entangled Mobilities across Global Spaces. Gardiner Barber, P. & Lem, W. (red.). Cham, Schweiz: Palgrave Macmillan.
Valentin, Karen and Karen Fog Olwig, eds. (2017) Mobility, Education and Life Trajectories: New and old migratory pathways. Abingdon: Routledge.
Olwig, Karen Fog (2015), Migrating for a Profession: Becoming a Caribbean nurse in post-WWII Britain. Identities - Global Studies in Culture and Power 22(3) 258-272.
Olwig, Karen Fog & Karen Valentin (2015) Mobility, education and life trajectories: new and old migratory pathways. Identities 22(3): 247-257.
Professor emeritus Karen Fog Olwig
E-mail: karen.fog.olwig@anthro.ku.dk
Telephone: +45 35 32 34 79
The project was funded by:
Gender and Migration received funding from the Carlsberg Foundation and Aksel Tovborg Jensens legat.
Project: Gender and Migration: Education, Family and Social Mobility among Caribbean Nurses
Principal investigator: Karen Fog Olwig
Start: January 2010
End: March 2015