Resisting Inequality but Loving Those Cheap Ironed Shirts: Danish Expatriates’ Experiences of Becoming Employers of Domestic Staff in India

Schliewe, Sanna

doi:10.1007/978-981-10-3581-4_14

Cited by 11 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…In cultural psychology, although there have been studies on tourism (Gillespie, 2006a(Gillespie, , 2006b, pilgrimage (Beckstead, 2010;Murakami, 2014) or migration (Abreu & Hale, 2011;Bhatia & Ram, 2009;Kadianaki, 2014), these have very little been addressed in terms of mobility. It is only recently that debates and issues related to the mobility turn have entered in cultural psychology (Adams, 2016;Ellis & Bhatia, 2019;Schliewe, 2017;Zittoun & Levitan, 2019;Zittoun, Levitan, & Cangia´, 2018). Nevertheless, cultural psychology has developed an important reflection on imagination as developmental and social dynamic over the last five years.…”

Section: From Imaginaries On Mobility To Imagining On the Movementioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the interplay between (im)mobility and imagination

Cangià

Zittoun

2020

Culture & Psychology

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NCCR on the moveThis special issue explores the interplay between imagination and human mobility. It presents theoretical, empirical and methodological explorations on how imagination and mobility shape each other. It asks questions such as: how is imagination triggered or blocked by people's experience of mobility? How does the creative process of imagining alternative worlds and lives in turn affect people's capacity and (im)possibilities to move? This editorial, in particular, highlights the contributions of the various articles and addresses a series of emerging ways of studying the interplay between mobility and imagination. It presents the specific ways through which the various articles of this issue offer important explorations on the imagined and potential character of mobility, and on the always changing and shifting nature of imagination on the move.Mobility is a crucial aspect of human life. As more than mere physical movement, mobility relates to the act of moving (Cresswell, 2006;Kaufmann, 2002) entangled with power, norms and meaning (Frello, 2008), and involving social, material, temporal and symbolic components that make movement (im)possible. The capacity and potential to move can be located 'in the dreaming of, planning for, or fear of mobility' (Leivestad, 2016, p. 143), in our fantasying on where, when and how we move. The field of possibilities to move physically can be infused with the act of imagining origins, traversals and destinations, with the aspiration for other lives and future selves. Or a person's imagination can be triggered, blocked or changed across time by the actual experience of (im)mobility. For one can move all around the word, and still have a limited imaginative experience; or conversely, one may be placebound, be stuck in an endless present and have the feeling that life

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Section: From Imaginaries On Mobility To Imagining On the Movementioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the interplay between (im)mobility and imagination

Cangià

Zittoun

2020

Culture & Psychology

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“…Moreover, based on my research, it does not seem likely that people depart from old value systems during temporary migration (see also Wortmeyer & Branco, 2019). Rather, as I have argued elsewhere (Schliewe, 2017), these old norms are selectively adapted alongside new social norms as the migrant works to understand, manage, and legitimate their current life-world. Notably, the migrant's original value system is present all the way down to their embodied reactions, as we will explore more below.…”

Section: The (Liminoid) Body In Privileged Migrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This helped me to understand the diversity and richness of the processes I was researching. This was particularly relevant in relation to the embodied experiences of morality: feelings of guilt and shame within the Danish expatriates' experiences of their novel higher social position in India, combined with their (novel) encounters with domestic workers in Delhi (see Schliewe, 2017). The unease about their position exists alongside the many benefits, comforts, and joys that come with that position, and this combination is central to this type of privileged migration-expatriates from the Global North moving to the Global South.…”

Section: Uneasy Encountersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Through interviews, formal and informal, as well as general observations, I found out that experiences of shame over one's privileged position, and the employment of a range of strategies (including hiding shopping bills from staff) to level out such unease, were extremely common among the Danish expatriates I was studying. These expatriates were not only engaged in cultural encounters in general, but with a temporary migration into a new (higher) social position, which also had to be negotiated on several levels (see Schliewe, 2017). Furthermore, due to my longitudinal design, I could track how my informants found alternative ways over time to understand and legitimize their current privileges: ways that made them able to keep a feeling and picture of themselves as the same morally sound people they were before the migration in spite of the inequalities they now participate in every day (although their ambiguity never fully disappears).…”

Section: Uneasy Encountersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Embodied ethnography in psychology: Learning points from expatriate migration research

Schliewe

2020

Culture & Psychology

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Interviews and observation are often the preferred methods when psychologists conduct fieldwork. However, psychology can learn from recent developments in anthropology and sociology. Here researchers use their own embodied sensations in participatory research as a way to investigate less verbalized, more hidden, sensorial, and affective aspects of the life-worlds they are studying. In this article, I use case examples from research on privileged migrants (expatriates) to demonstrate how significant insights can emerge when we apply an embodied approach in our research. Migration is not only behavioral, social, verbal, or imaginative events but includes the migrant’s body—its sensory experiences and emotions. Thus, we need to embrace additional methods to investigate multifaceted psychological processes such as migration.

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“…Due to the absence of formal legal contracts and the lack of strong trade unions for female domestic workers, the salaries of these women are determined by individual bargaining and the goodwill of employers. Maids with a degree of education have better opportunities in expatriate and upper-class households, where the employers are sensitive to the high level of religious and class-based inequalities that are embedded in the globalisation of cheap labour (see Grover 2017;Schliewe 2017). However, most domestic workers have their occupational histories intimately tied to numerous economic, physical and mental health problems, often stemming from class-based discrimination in households.…”

Section: A Brief Overview Of Female Domestic Workers In Kolkatamentioning

confidence: 99%

Gods, Gurus, Prophets and the Poor: Exploring Informal, Interfaith Exchanges among Working Class Female Workers in an Indian City

Sen

2019

Religions

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This article revolves around the narratives of Sabita (Muslim), Radha (Hindu) and Sharleen (Christian), migrant women in their mid-forties, who have been working as maids, cooks and cleaners in middle-class housing colonies in Kolkata, a city in eastern India. Informal understandings of gendered oppressions across religious traditions often dominate the conversations of the three working-class women. Like many labourers from slums and lower-class neighbourhoods, they meet and debate religious concerns in informal ‘resting places’ (under a tree, on a park bench, at a tea stall, on a train, at a corner of a railway platform). These anonymous spaces are usually devoid of religious symbols, as well as any moral surveillance of women’s colloquial abuse of male dominance in society. I show how the anecdotes of struggle, culled across multiple religious practices, intersect with the shared existential realities of these urban workers. They temporarily empower female members of the informal workforce in the city, to create loosely defined gendered solidarities in the face of patriarchal authority, and reflect on daily discrimination against economically marginalised migrant women. I argue that these fleeting urban rituals underline the more vital role of (what I describe as) poor people’s ‘casual philosophies’, in enhancing empathy and dialogue between communities that are characterised by political tensions in India.

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Resisting Inequality but Loving Those Cheap Ironed Shirts: Danish Expatriates’ Experiences of Becoming Employers of Domestic Staff in India

Cited by 11 publications

References 18 publications

Exploring the interplay between (im)mobility and imagination

Exploring the interplay between (im)mobility and imagination

Embodied ethnography in psychology: Learning points from expatriate migration research

Gods, Gurus, Prophets and the Poor: Exploring Informal, Interfaith Exchanges among Working Class Female Workers in an Indian City

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