We continue with our research seminars on the 20th of May, 2022, 5 pm (Tbilisi time) with the talk ‘Managing the crisis — Georgian care-workers in Thessaloniki’

In the last three decades tens of thousands of Georgian women endeavored the risky project of migration to Greece. Migrant care-workers are one of the most vulnerable groups of people in crisis-ridden Greece due to their labor in the informal domestic sector. With their ‘invisible’ care work for children, elderly and people with disability they contribute to the reproduction and well-being of both, the Greek middle and higher class as well as thousands of households back in Georgia.

Since 2012, the Greek economic crisis has rapidly dampened the flow of migration. Nevertheless, despite worsening living conditions marked by exploitation, vulnerability and uncertainty on various levels, thousands of Georgian care-workers stayed in Greece.

The ethnographic research is centered on the narratives of middle age and elderly Georgian women in Thessaloniki who have been educated in Soviet Georgia. It explores various strategies migrant women employ to cope with uncertainties, caring responsibility and the multi-layered concurrent crises – the post-socialist reality in Georgia and the economic and financial crisis in Greece.

Biographical statement: Weronika Zmiejewski obtained a BA in Social Anthropology from the University of Freiburg and an MA in Central Asian Studies from Humboldt University of Berlin. She completed her PhD at Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena entitled “Georgian Women on the Move – Migration to Greece in Times of Crisis”. Since January 2020 she has been working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.

Seminar will take part in Zoom platform.

For more information, please contact: mariam.darchiashvili@iliauni.edu.ge