Caring for a Living
Migrant Women, Aging Citizens, and Italian Families
Francesca Degiuli
Reviews and Awards
Finalist for the 2019 Suraj Mal and Shyama Devi Agarwal Book Prize awarded by the International Association for Feminist Economics
"Shaped by global forces of economic restructuring, im/migration, and demographic change, eldercare emerges in this stunning ethnography as a distinct form of labor in which keeping company and attentive intimacy separates the job from other kinds of household work. The Italian case highlights the ways that state policy maintains familial relations of care through fictive kinship while sustaining traditional gender burdens and reinforcing neoliberal responses to human need. Caring for a Living is a must-read for policy makers and scholars alike." --Eileen Boris, PhD, MA, Hull Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara; co-author, Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State
"Care drain is an emerging dimension of immigrant's flows, and aging populations in developed societies foster the demand of care workers coming from abroad. The thorough analysis provided by Francesca Degiuli intersects migration regime, care regime, and employment regime, highlighting a crucial process in the restructuring of Welfare States in contemporary societies. Even if her focus is on Italian society, the author's analysis goes well beyond, providing a comprehensive glance on relations between the elderly, households, States, and migrant workers. I highly recommend this book to every scholar who wants to understand why, where, and how migrants are necessary and the terms in which receiving societies make use of them." --Maurizio Ambrosini, PhD, Professor of Sociology of Migrations, University of Milan, Department of Social and Political Sciences