Gender, mobilities and migration during and post COVID-19 pandemic- vulnerability, resilience and renewal

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Martina Brandt, since 10/2022
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 495580624

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a major global health challenge with economic and social consequences for individuals, families and communities worldwide. 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 and precarious. Lockdowns, border closures and increasing police controls have provided contexts for rising gender-based violence and exploitation, especially for migrant women with insecure legal status or limited 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 and also the agency and resources women mobilised to navigate the crisis.Our aim is to explore how migrant women have faced these 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 and Poland. Documenting the international mobilities of women in 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 advance our understanding of rising inequalities worldwide and propose evidence-based solutions for recovery.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Brazil, Poland, United Kingdom
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Dr. Adriana Piscitelli; Professorin Dr. Daniela Sime; Professorin Dr. Krystyna Slany
• Ehemalige Antragstellerin: Professorin Dr. Karolina Barglowski, until 9/2022