For over half a century, the Middle East has been major migration corridor for domestic workers from Asia and Africa. This book Illuminates the multidimensionality of these workers' lives as they engage in finding a balance between acting and being acted upon, struggle and accommodation, and movement and stasis.

"This edited volume, based on ethnographic fieldwork, provides important new insights in the everyday lives of migrant domestic workers in the Middle East. With the home turned into a workplace and privacy to be found in the public, it unsettles conventional notions about the public and the private. Employing agency and mobility as key terms, the case studies go beyond the employer domestic worker relation, and convincingly show how foreign domestics forge new socialities through support networks and activism, through developing new religious ties and communities, and through marriage and childbearing." - Annelies Moors, professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

"This collection of essays is a significant addition to the growing literature and concern about migrant domestic workers around the world. Acknowledging but transcending human rights discourse of restriction and abuse, these scholarly elaborations reveal the equally important nuances of agency of Asian and African women and how they cope as individuals and as communities in the Middle East." - Ray Jureidini, professor of Ethics and Migration, Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics, Hamad Bin Khalifa University

Autorentext
Marina de Regt, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands Nada Elyas, Taibah University, Madinah, Saudia Arabia, and University of Hull, UK Bina Fernandez, University of Melbourne, Australia Naomi Hosod, Kagawa University, Japan Mark Johnson, University of Hull, UK Claudia Liebelt, University of Bayreuth, Germany Pardis Mahdavi, Pomona College, USA Amrita Pande, University of Cape Town, South Africa Akiko Watanabe, Bunkyo University, Japan

Inhalt

1. Making a Home in the World: Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East; Bina Fernandez and Marina de Regt 2. Forging Intimate and Work Ties: Migrant Domestic Workers Resist in Lebanon; Amrita Pande 3. Degrees of (un)freedom: The Exercise of Agency by Ethiopian Migrant Domestic Workers in Kuwait and Lebanon; Bina Fernandez 4. Immobilized Migrancy: Inflexible Citizenship and Flexible Practices Among Migrants in the Gulf; Pardis Mahdavi 5. The 'Mama Mary' of the White City's Underside: Reflections on a Filipina Domestic Workers' Block Rosary in Tel Aviv, Israel; Claudia Liebelt 6. Creating a 'New Home' Away from Home: Religious Conversions of Filipina Domestic Workers in Dubai and Doha; Naomi Hosoda and Akiko Watanabe 7. Caring for the Future in the Kingdom: Saudi and Filipino Women Making Home in a World of Movement; Nada Elyas and Mark Johnson 8. 'Shall We Leave or Not?' Ethiopian Women's Notions of Home and Belonging and the Crisis in Yemen; Marina de Regt