Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East The Home and the World [Hardcover]

For over half a century, the Middle East has been major migration corridor for domestic workers from Asia and Africa. This book Illuminates the multidimensionality of these workers' lives as they engage in finding a balance between acting and being acted upon, struggle and accommodation, and movement and stasis.1. Making a Home in the World: Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East; Bina Fernandez and Marina de Regt 2. Forging Intimate and Work Ties: Migrant Domestic Workers Resist in Lebanon; Amrita Pande 3. Degrees of (un)freedom: The Exercise of Agency by Ethiopian Migrant Domestic Workers in Kuwait and Lebanon; Bina Fernandez 4. Immobilized Migrancy: Inflexible Citizenship and Flexible Practices Among Migrants in the Gulf; Pardis Mahdavi 5. The 'Mama Mary' of the White City's Underside: Reflections on a Filipina Domestic Workers' Block Rosary in Tel Aviv, Israel; Claudia Liebelt 6. Creating a 'New Home' Away from Home: Religious Conversions of Filipina Domestic Workers in Dubai and Doha; Naomi Hosoda and Akiko Watanabe 7. Caring for the Future in the Kingdom: Saudi and Filipino Women Making Home in a World of Movement; Nada Elyas and Mark Johnson 8. 'Shall We Leave or Not?' Ethiopian Women's Notions of Home and Belonging and the Crisis in Yemen; Marina de Regt

This edited volume, based on ethnographic fieldwork, provides important new insights in the everyday lives of migrant domestic workers in the Middle East. With the home turned into a workplace and privacy to be found in the public, it unsettles conventional notions about the public and the private. Employing agency and mobility as key terms, the case studies go beyond the employer domestic worker relation, and convincingly show how foreign domestics forge new socialities through support networks and activism, through developing new religious ties and communities, and through marriage and childbearing. - Annelies Moors, professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, ThelÃ,