This research project is an anthropological study of domestic paid female care work. Building on (socialist) feminist scholarly traditions on domestic work, which places care at the centre of political economy, the research project investigates informal domestic paid female care work as a socially productive and reproductive relational activity in a dialectic relationship with broader social transformations in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and beyond. It focusses on two connected sites—Sarajevo (primary site) and Austria (auxiliary site, a nearby top destination for BiH labour migration by carers)—to reconstruct the dynamics and dialectics of such work, including an examination of how processes and discourses of Europeanization circulate and frame people's motivations, values, needs and responsibilities. Tracing how social transformations converge in care work, this project affirms taking care as a prism for studying social transformations, as a deeply gendered node of social reproduction with multiple dimensions.
Nejra Nuna Čengić is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Graz, Centre for Southeast European Studies. She holds a PhD in the Anthropology of Everyday Life from AMEU-ISH Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her research interests and work focus on precarious work, gender, memory(-ies), storytelling and violence. She made a significant contribution to the establishment of the Gender Studies Programme at the University of Sarajevo, where she gained most of her working experience. Her current research project deals with domestic paid female care work.
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