Nina Sahraoui

• Phd
• Research fellow at French National Centre for Scientific Research

The gendered implications of migration and asylum regimes require further attention in an era of border militarization and increasingly hostile environments, especially across the Global North, a region in which many countries pride themselves on standing for gender equality, whereas they in fact perpetuate gendered forms of discrimination and viol...

This article invites a dialogue between decolonial perspectives on diasporas and feminist standpoint theories by exploring processes of standpoint formation by women of Moroccan descent who grew up in postcolonial France. The article draws on 18 interviews with women aged in their 20s to their 40s, as well as a long-term engagement with these quest...

Background Migrants’ health has attracted the attention of researchers for many years, particularly from the perspective of barriers in access to healthcare systems. Providing high quality care to migrants and refugees, especially in contexts of significant and sudden arrivals, may be particularly challenging. Aim The aim of our research was to le...

Background: After the outbreak of the full-scale war in Ukraine, about 2 million people sought protection in Poland. Providing high-quality care for migrants and refugees, especially in times of significant arrivals, can be particularly challenging. Aim: To learn about the experiences and strategies of midwives providing maternity care to Ukrainian...

Cette contribution propose une approche intersectionnelle des frontières en examinant comment les dynamiques de genre, de classe et de race, notamment, modifient la manière dont les individus franchissent les frontières internationales, et comment les frontières internes (sociales, administratives, symboliques), bien qu’immatérielles, affectent les...

This article examines the postcolonial politics of migration control in Mayotte, an overseas French department, and argues that these bear necropolitical consequences. It sheds light on the gendered dimension of this necropolitical power by focusing on the life and border-crossing experiences of undocumented Como- rian women. Entrenched barriers to...

This chapter is an exploration of the contradictions and dissonances of coloniality exemplified through the shared inertias of strict mobility control in three cases transitioning to various degrees from colonialism to nationalism. Joining in conversation with post-colonial thinkers, we foreground the ways in which coloniality continues to permeate...

This book brings an intersectional perspective to border studies, drawing on case studies from across the world to consider the ways in which notably gender and race dynamics change the ways in which people cross international borders, and how diffuse and virtual borders impact on migrants' experiences. By bringing together 11 ethnographies, the b...

This introductory chapter explains how the book draws on postcolonial and decoloniality studies to challenge exceptionalist narratives and Eurocentric epistemologies that underly the fields of refugee and forced migration studies. Scholarship from disciplines such as international relations, sociology, criminology, and political science often revea...

This book brings an intersectional perspective to border studies, drawing on case studies from across the world to consider the ways in which notably gender and race dynamics change the ways in which people cross international borders, and how diffuse and virtual borders impact on migrants' experiences. By bringing together 11 ethnographies, the b...

This concluding chapter highlights the volume’s three main contribution to the literature, namely i) relating micro, meso and macro levels of analysis by foregrounding a conceptualisation of GBV that addresses both interpersonal as well as structural causes of GBV; ii) offering a pioneering comparison of how GBV policy frames and migration manageme...

The introduction to this volume presents the key questions around gender-based violence in migration contexts to which the eight chapters of the volume seek to provide empirical and theoretical answers. The introduction equally clarifies the conceptual underpinnings and scholarly anchorage of the volume by defining the notion of gender-based violen...

This chapter is based on a critical analysis of the political discourse on GBV and migration in France and assesses the processes through which culturalist framings have contributed to the racialisation of the issue and the stigmatisation of migrants. Within state-sponsored reports, notably by the French inter-ministerial mission for the protection...

This chapter offers a study of women seeking asylum in France to analyse the specific challenges to health and well-being that arise at the crossroad of migration and gender. We seek to foreground the voices and experiences of women asylum seekers to highlight the continuum of violence which they face and the precarity induced through the denial of...

The recent arrival of refugees from Ukraine has thrown into sharp focus the racialised colonial underpinnings of the French asylum and refugee system, as the open-door welcome afforded to Ukrainians, supposedly “closer” to the French population, highlights the rejection and marginalisation of “others” who seek refuge in the country. The current sit...

The recent arrival of refugees from Ukraine has thrown into sharp focus the racialised colonial underpinnings of the French asylum and refugee system, as the open-door welcome afforded to Ukrainians, supposedly “closer” to the French population, highlights the rejection and marginalisation of “others” who seek refuge in the country.

Bringing together three case-studies differently situated on the colonial–postcolonial continuum, this chapter explores how coloniality, as initially conceptualized by Quijano (2000) and further developed by other decolonial scholars (for example, Gutiérrez Rodriguez, 2018), permeates migration governance in three distinct settings: the Spanish enc...

World history is peppered with population displacements, forced migrations, and expulsions, and European colonialism was implicated in the forced movement of countless people from the 15th century onwards. The founding of many instruments of international law dealing with forced migration, including the current international refugee regime, were dr...

Les discours et les législations « de crise » sont devenus une constante de la gestion des mobilités par les États européens. Ils produisent des effets ambivalents. Tandis que les politiques de crise ont été à juste titre analysées pour pointer les logiques de l’exceptionnel et du temporaire pour mieux militariser, refouler, ou marginaliser les exi...

En s’appuyant sur deux études de cas menées à deux frontières européennes, celle de l’enclave espagnole de Ceuta d’une part, et celle du département français de Mayotte d’autre part, cet article propose une réflexion autour de l’imbrication du contrôle migratoire et des soins prodigués aux non-citoyens. À partir de l’étude des dispositifs concernan...

In this research anthology, inequality in Swedish working life in a Sweden marked by increased inequality, is studied. Racialised inequality, racism and discrimination in individual workplaces are focused, but inequalities based on class and gender are also studied. The concept of inequality regime is used by several of the authors to analyse work...

This critical review of Ireland's policy response to gender-based violence as it affects migrant women contributes to recent literature that focuses on how states' legal and policy regimes can be part of the problem, in this case adding to rather than reducing GBV related vulnerabilities experienced by migrant women. Through a review of key policy,...

This ‘state-of-the art’ article on the role of deservingness in governing migrants’ access to social services situates our themed section’s contribution to the literature at the intersection between the study of street-level bureaucracy and practices of internal bordering through social policy. Considering the increasing relevance of migration cont...

This article examines how Comorian pregnant women in Mayotte, a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean, came to embody an unwanted presence as irregular migrants due to their children’s and their own potential claims to belonging, while they are entitled by law to access perinatal and maternal care. This article argues that framing undocume...

Drawing on Foucauldian biopolitics, Max Weber's and Hannah Arendt's understandings of bureaucracy, and Achille Mbembe's theoretical insights into necropolitical power, I propose the notion of humanitarian bureaucracy to account for the involvement of medical personnel in the summary deportations of pregnant Comorian women in Mayotte, a French overs...

By bringing together two sets of qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2017 with humanitarian organizations and migrant women on the two sides of the Eastern Moroccan-Spanish border, this article examines the ways in which women humanitarians exercise power over women’s lives, bodies and mobility. Though humanitarianism in the border context...

Cet article analyse la gestion migratoire à Mayotte à l’aune du concept de « nécropolitique » inspiré des écrits d’Achille Mbembe. Cette notion permet de rendre compte de l’exercice d’un pouvoir en périphérie postcoloniale qui expose les non-citoyens à de multiples violences. Dans un premier temps est mis en lumière le caractère systématique de pra...

Building upon and contributing to a feminist geography of borders, the chosen methodological approach examines women's bodily experiences at a Southern EUropean border, the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article scrutinises the care interactions unfolding in a Centre for Immigrants between medica...

Examining which actors determine undocumented migrants’ access to healthcare on the ground, this volume looks at what happens in the daily interactions between administrative personnel, healthcare professionals and migrant patients in healthcare institutions across Europe. Borders across Healthcare explores contemporary moral economies of the healt...

Owing to a growing policing of borders, healthcare professionals become increasingly involved in the biopoli-tical management of migrants' mobility. While their presence on sites of migration control and detention is necessary to ensure migrants' access to healthcare, their role risks being instrumentalized to ensure the sustainability of detention...

Owing to a growing policing of borders, healthcare professionals become increasingly involved in the biopolitical management of migrants’ mobility. While their presence on sites of migration control and detention is necessary to ensure migrants’ access to healthcare, their role risks being instrumentalized to ensure the sustainability of detention...

Mayotte occupe une place singulière dans le régime français des éloignements puisque le nombre de personnes placées en rétention administrative sur l’île est sans commune mesure avec le contexte métropolitain. Les femmes enceintes sont, elles aussi, interpellées et reconduites aux Comores dans les heures qui suivent l’arrestation. Celles arrêtées e...

Through a focus on experiences of racism and discrimination at the workplace level, as narrated by respondents themselves, this chapter attempts to shed light on some of the mechanisms that foster disintegration by impacting negatively on migrants’ and racialised minorities’ access and outcomes in the labour market. It explores non-EU migrant and m...

Dans le contexte de la montée du sentiment anti-immigration à travers l’UE, une meilleure compréhension des pratiques "faisant frontière" à travers la société, au-delà de l'attention portée aux espaces classiques du contrôle migratoire, est nécessaire. Pourtant, ces sujets restent insuffisamment traités. Les acteurs sociaux dans les domaines de la...

If you see somebody oppressing someone, you have to speak up or if you can’t do anything, in your mind you have to be against it. But if you just sit down and watch, this makes you also a sinner, you understand? If you bear oppression, and if you don’t fight it, you also make a big sin, that’s why we have always to fight, we have to. Wherever you a...

This chapter provides an overview of the main characteristics of the gender, migration, care and employment regimes in the UK, France and Spain to provide the context to a gendered political economy of older-age. Before the following chapters explore how the intersections of these regimes produce specific structures of relations, experiences and co...

So right now we don’t know if in a year from now we’ll still be employed or if we’ll be laid off. Right now no job is stable, even if you have a contract. You know, I have a permanent contract but I don’t know to what extent it’s permanent, because we’ve seen … we’ve seen cases of colleagues who were on permanent contracts and for one reason or ano...

France is a country with rights. So give me my rights. A little bit of rights, because in a way I’m doing something for France. (…) Who will do it? It’s not François Hollande [former French President elected in 2012] who will do it, it’s not his wife, it’s the miserable care assistants. What I do, it’s not little, it’s really something. (Fouzia, 43...

The introduction to this book opens with Fouzia’s words: ‘What I do, it’s not little, it’s really something.’ I hope that the different chapters have illustrated and demonstrated the power of this statement, in spite of its apparent simplicity. Throughout the chapters, I have attempted to convey how the narrated experiences of participants sustaine...

How do you manage childcare?

What I like … you know we say it’s a vocation, often we say I have a heart, I’m humane, I’m affectionate … all of this is false. It’s extremely false because in cover letters it is often what is mentioned, I like older people, I like affection, closeness, I have a heart, all of this is very false. Everyone has a heart and no one has the monopoly of...

I think I’ve done here enough of what I had to do and that’s time for me to return, because I don’t see the situation improving, I see that each time it’s worse, I’ve been offered to work as live-in carer for a miserable wage, honestly it both saddens me and makes me laugh when they tell you. And that’s like this everywhere, so that’s the current s...

They teach us that we need to learn to separate emotions and work, I’m against it. For me for example, that’s my emotions that make me work with passion. That’s what makes me love each person. (Saba, 41, Cameroon, Paris)

This chapter presents the main theoretical endeavour of this book. While I began from the premise of institutional ethnography and its underpinning standpoint theory, the empirical findings of this research led me to reach out for the literature on the ethics of care with the view of engaging to the fullest with the collected data. If the theoretic...

This article examines the ‘integration discourse’ that characterises migrants’ governance in the Centre for the Temporary Stay of Immigrants (CETI) in the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Beyond observing the incongruous character of the integration discourse, the article unpacks the ways in which this framing fulfils a specific function within the broa...

Partant d’une analyse des expériences quotidiennes de travail de soignant⋅e⋅s racialisé⋅e⋅s employé⋅e⋅s dans le secteur privé des soins aux personnes âgées à Londres, Paris et Madrid, cet article avance que, pour comprendre la précarité vécue par les soignant⋅e⋅s au quotidien et éclairer les multiples vulnérabilités que leur travail engendre, il es...

In the context of ageing populations, increasing participation of women in the labour market, growing marketisation of care provision, and, most importantly, global inequalities, racialised care workers have come to fulfil a key role within older-age care in western European societies. This book presents a gendered political economy of migrant and...

In Greece, Italy, and Spain, austerity policies combined with the structural density of migration flows have had concrete social and material manifestations in the delivery of public health care. Through our ethnographic case studies in Lampedusa and southeastern Sicily, Melilla, and Athens, we examine the maternity care offered to migrant patients...

The reproductive care of pregnant migrants entering the European Union via its Mediterranean borders represents an under-examined topic, despite a growing scholarly emphasis on female migrants and the gendered aspects of migration in the past three decades. This article uses ethnographic data gathered in Greece, Italy, and Spain to examine pregnant...

While the feminisation of transnational migrant labour is now a firmly ingrained feature of the contemporary global economy, the specific experiences and understand-ings of labour in a range of gendered sectors of global and regional labour markets still require comparative and ethnographic attention. This book adopts a particular focus on migrants...

Artykuł ma na celu przedstawienie nowej teoretycznej perspektywy na prekaryjną pracę wynikającej z feministycznej filozofii moralności (feminist moral philosophy) oraz etyki troski (ethic of care) poprzez empiryczną analizę doświadczeń migrantek oraz przedstawicielek mniejszości etnicznych pracujących w prywatnych ośrodkach opieki nad osobami stars...

This paper argues that labour migrants who emigrated from Morocco between the 1950s and the 1970s have experienced a reconfiguration of their power relationships vis-à-vis and within the Moroccan state. The paper examines Moroccan state–diaspora relations and explores the work of transnational organisations that operate between France and Morocco....

This paper explores the relation between emigration and empowerment of Moroccan indigenous groups from the regions of Souss and Rif. It is based on semi-structured interviews conducted between September 2012 and January 2013 with six migrant community leaders engaged in transnational activities between France and Morocco, participant observation wi...

This paper addresses the social implications of an increasing use of Zero Hours Contracts (ZHCs) in the UK, and its specific impacts on Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) women. Workers on ZHCs have no set number of hours and therefore their income is not secured; furthermore they often have no sick and no holiday pay. The nature of this contr...