Ermira Danaj

Independent Scholar

In this chapter, I explore the experiences of female migrants who migrated to undertake undergraduate or graduate studies rather than specifically for economic or work reasons. I analyse a group of female student migrants who returned to Tirana after their international migratory trajectories. Unlike the other group of international migrants introd...

This chapter aims to present the migration framework and the situation of women in Albania. The first section briefly reviews the socio-economic conditions of Albania during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which I separate into two main periods: before and after 1991. I take the year 1991 as the official end of the mono-party political sy...

This chapter focuses on the group of women who migrated internationally. To distinguish them from the women who migrated abroad for education (Chap. 10.1007/978-3-030-92092-0_7 ) but to avoid limiting this group to only women who migrated for work purposes, I refer to them as international migrant women . Common to this whole group is that after th...

This chapter sets out the epistemological lenses and the central theoretical concepts guiding this research. Given the many theories and models regarding the intersection of gender and migration, it is important to highlight those that inspire this research and help to investigate and better understand how gender affects migration processes and, vi...

This chapter analyses the experiences of young women from various villages and cities across Albania who migrated to Tirana to study. Here, ‘on their own’ refers to single women who moved to and lived in Tirana by themselves while their parents and siblings stayed in their city or village of origin. Upon their graduation, which had happened within...

This open access book focuses on Albanian internal and international female migration and places gender at the heart of postsocialist transformation. It explores the vulnerabilities that arise for female citizens from the contradictory policies produced by the Albanian state. By illuminating the intersection of gender and migration, it shows how Al...

This chapter explores the trajectories of those participants who migrated internally to Tirana for reasons other than education. The data draws from interviews conducted with eight women, the majority of whom had already married when Communism collapsed. These women provide distinctive insights as they stand on the verge of and link the late commun...

Shqiptarja e Re (the New Albanian Woman) was the official organ of the B.G.Sh. (Women’s Union of Albania). Its activity spanned from 1943 to 1991, accompanying the inception, consolidation and the downfall of the communist regime in Albania. The magazine started as an imitation of women’s magazines in the Soviet Union and later developed its own id...

The definition provided by the Istanbul Convention confirms what social research about VAW and DV has been saying for many years now: VAW is not perpetrated by men who are sick, or alcohol abusers, or in whatever particular situation. It is instead perpetrated by men who think they are entitled to do so, that they have the right to beat or kill a w...

... there is a common feature among far-right groups – the binary nature of gender and an anti-feminist approach. Anti-feminism is a ‘glue’ that makes together various groups that are not sharing necessarily the same ideologies and practices. However, they share together their hostility towards gender studies or educational programmes based on a ge...

The aim of this contribution is to identify how gender and feminist studies have positioned themselves within the higher education system in post-socialist Albania. In Albania, the post-socialist context was featured by a nega- tive connotation of the left-wing perspective hindering the development of critical and feminist thinking in academia. The...

International and internal migration have characterised Albania since 1990, the last year of the Communist regime in the country that was established in the aftermath of the Second World War. While the number of studies on Albanian migration (both international and internal) has grown, only a few have adopted a feminist perspective. A feminist pers...

This chapter discusses the internal migration of young Albanian women to Tirana for educational purposes. Its aim is to investigate how is gender embedded with the process of migration of young women, and the effects of migration in shaping gendered subjectivities and gender relations. The chapter explores how young Albanian women use education as...

Introduction This chapter focuses on the experiences of highly educated female internal migrants in Albania. Since the fall of socialism in 1991 and the erosion of state infrastructures that strictly regulated internal and international migration, an estimated 1.5 million people have left Albania, more than half of the current resident population (...

Gender is a factor of youth migration; it shapes the roles, capacities, access to resources, and cultural expectations in society. Gender defines who leaves and who stays behind in the place of origin, or the extent from which the youth travels outside of their own communities. This collection is possibly the first to present the intersection of ge...

This article focuses on the experiences of Albanian women migrating to Italy and Greece, exploring their reasons for migration, their experiences abroad, and the manifestation of their entrepreneurial spirit upon return to Albania. The article also examines how migration can challenge and transform but also reinforce gender equalities; it might lea...

This chapter discusses the internal migration of young Albanian women to Tirana for educational purposes. Its aim is to investigate how is gender embedded with the process of migration of young women and which are the effects of migration in shaping gendered subjectivities and gender relations. The chapter explores how young Albanian women use educ...

Since 2017, the Council of Europe has co-operated with the MoLFSAEO in supporting their institutional setting and practices related to combat violence against women and domestic violence. This targeted support has included several training activities and seminars to the Interdisciplinary Working Group in charge of the implementation of the Council...

This article examines the shape organized women’s activism took in Albania after the fall of the communist regime. It also analyses how gender and feminist studies have positioned themselves within the higher education system, the relationship between media and feminism and the new alternative spaces of women’s activism and feminist resistance to g...

This study aims, first, to explore and understand the interrelation of gender and migration and, second, to investigate and trace the migration trajectories of Albanian female migrants. The feminist and the constructivist approaches provide the epistemological lenses of this research. The feminist perspective allows critically analysing women’s exp...

The main research question for this paper is: Are there radical left wing movements in Albania and Kosovo and what are their main traits? Through answering this question, we will explore the development (or lack thereof) of radical left wing movements. With radical left we intend movements that reject the underlying socio-economic structure of cont...

Gender stratification refers to the inequalities between women and men regarding wealth, power, and privilege. Gender is a socially structured principle and represents a hierarchical, asymmetrical, and unequal division between men and women. Gender stratification is a relatively new concept borne of the feminist perspective in social sciences, espe...

Women are paid less than men. Despite stipulations regarding equal pay being included in the legislation of many countries, and despite the fact that equal pay for equal work is a right included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, women are still paid less than men in almost all countries. The unequal divisions of productive and reproduct...

During Socialism, the “women’s issue” was among the key state policies in Albania. The emancipation issue followed a pattern similar to other socialist countries, called the “women’s emancipation model”. It was part both of the state rhetoric and the general need to include women in the “socialist transformative processes”. This involved policies t...

Depuis le début des années 1990, l'Albanie a vécu des changements sociaux, économiques et politiques importants. Le pays s'est ouvert aux influences externes; un nouveau système politique multipartite a été mis en place comme une première étape vers une démocratie de type occidental ; la nouvelle économie de marché commence à introduire de nouvelle...