GEN-MIGRA: gender, mobilities and migration during and post COVID-19 pandemic - vulnerabilities, resilience and renewal

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a major global health challenge with economic and social consequences for individuals, families and communities worldwide. Emerging evidence shows that its impacts have significantly affected women through rising inequalities. For many women, migration is an adaptive response to social risks and inequalities. During the pandemic, mobility and economic restrictions have posed severe challenges to migrant women's labour, care obligations, safety and well-being. Many migrant women work in essential sectors that were the hardest hit, also low paid, precarious and informal. Lockdowns, border closures and increasing police controls have provided contexts for rising gender-based violence and exploitation, especially for women with insecure legal status or low resources.GEN-MIGRA is a ground-breaking project that transforms our knowledge about the vulnerabilities experienced by women engaged in international mobilities and their resilience strategies. It will adopt a transnational, intersectional and comparative approach to explore how the global nature of the pandemic has impacted transnational patterns of female mobility, in the context of varied national responses to the crisis. Its analytical approach focuses on intersecting vulnerabilities, the agency and resources that women mobilised to navigate the crisis. Our aim is to explore how migrant women have faced those challenges and produced movements of resistance and renewal, strategizing and repositioning themselves in the labour market and the implications of these decisions for family life. GEN-MIGRA will investigate this through an innovative analysis in countries with diverse social protection policies, namely Brazil, UK, Germany, Poland, Spain and Portugal. Documenting the international mobilities of women from these countries, we will produce empirically grounded and theoretically driven knowledge on the impact of national policies, communities and kinship support on migrant women. This is an ambitious research agenda with theoretical and methodological innovations. GEN-MIGRA will challenge our understanding of the effects and solutions to rising intersectional inequalities worldwide. (AU)