Minga biographic workshops with highly skilled migrant women: enhancing spaces of inclusion

Abstract

This paper proposes the notion of 'marginalised elites' to examine highly skilled migrant women, a group that has been neglected by feminist participatory research. It asks what principles and methods can be used towards inclusive practices in studies of migration and social exclusion. The paper contributes to the literature by designing and critically evaluating the method of participatory Minga workshops, which create inclusionary spaces of data collection and critical analysis with highly skilled migrant women living in Switzerland. Using this case study, the paper questions notions of privilege, power and positionality commonly used in feminist participatory approaches. Minga Biographic workshops enhance spaces of inclusion, become 'spaces of personal transformation', question the perceived inferiority of migrant women, and produce original scientific insights on social exclusion. These results point to the role of academics as facilitators of personal transformation, and the need to closely consider the added scientific value of feminist participatory methodologies.

Unequal Access to Support and Privileges

“…Yvonne Riaño, who has studied extensively the situation of highly educated women from South America married to Swiss men, highlights a similar dynamic (Baghdadi & Riaño, 2014;Riaño, 2003Riaño, , 2011Riaño, , 2015Riaño, , 2016Riaño, Limacher, Aschwanden, Hirsig, & Wastl-Walter, 2015). Upon arrival in Switzerland, these women often lack institutional support.…”

“…In addition to other disadvantages -such as insufficient proficiency in the local language and difficulties having their foreign qualifications recognised -they lacked support from acquaintances to access professional opportunities. Riaño speaks of "marginalised elites" (Riaño, 2016), because these university-educated women from middle-to upper middle-class families, after having been professionally active and independent in Latin America, went through a process of dequalification in Switzerland and, in many cases, remained trapped in the domestic sphere despite their original intention to work.…”

Editorial: Strengths, Risks and Limits of Doing Participatory Research in Migration Studies

“…PR has been frequently applied when working along/with vulnerable groups. Although some authors have noted the advantages of using PR working with specific vulnerable populations (Aldridge, 2014), there is no practical reason why PR cannot be used for other types of non-marginalized (or not totally marginal) groups (Riaño, 2016). This is not exclusively of PR but a general trend in research where groups previously marked as problematic become research topics (Delgado, 1999, p.10), while elites and other powerful groups remain as unmarked categories of research.…”

Introduction

“…The collective dimension of research in social sciences is rarely acknowledged. Despite the spread of participatory methodologies (Riaño, 2016), and although academic projects tend to be increasingly collaborative, social sciences researchers generally appear to be singular thinkers. Academic competition encourages researchers to insist on the originality of their work, which often hides the cooperative nature of research processes, and the importance of the discussion, exchange, and confrontation of ideas.…”