Broadcast: Events

This talk explores East–West inequalities in Europe in the field of care work - and locates these in the broader context of the racialised political economy of social reproduction. Rather than studying how East–West inequalities drive migration, Uhde focuses on how the marketisation of care and the othering of women from ‘Eastern European’ member states co-produce East–West inequalities in Europe - while at the same time legitimising the construction of bordered Europe as a racialised space of whiteness. She draws out the contours of the European care border regime and analyses how it is enacted in the geographical space of central Europe. She suggests that the intra-EU workers’ border crossings provide an important sociological insight into the marketised geographies of care. She also traces how the - open-yet-bordered - EU arena contributes to social categorisations of people and the continued systemic devaluation of care. The European care border regime, in which the capitalist political economy of social reproduction meets the EU border regime, sustains the care sector in wealthier EU countries. Care provision relies on the mobility of women from Europe’s East who substitute the growing deficit of care workers. They occupy an ambiguous position as white-but-not-Western. The lecture presents how practices of extraction in marketized care alter and intensify the exploitation of women on the move – and reflects on the role of the ethno-racialized categorisation as ‘Eastern European’. It approaches cross-border mobility of EU citizens as an analytical viewpoint to illustrate how the structural privilege ‘to-be-cared-for’ is linked to ‘Western Whiteness’ as a geopolitical marker of difference and how the white-but-not-Western positionality of Europe’s East masks its racialised foundation.

Dr Zuzana Uhde is a researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Sociology and an external research affiliate at the Institute of Gender and Development Studies, Makerere University, Uganda. Her work sits at the intersection of critical social theory, feminist theory, and critical migration and border studies. Her current research revolves around analyses of transnational social reproduction and marketisation of care, and global migration governance and political-economic and technopolitical production of bordering processes, with a regional expertise focused on East Central Europe and Eastern Africa. She is dedicated to fostering research collaborations across Europe’s East and Africa to bypass the Western hegemonic knowledge production. She also works as a co-editor of the journal Gender and Research and sits on the editorial board of the publishing house Karolinum – SLON series. She is a member of the management committee of the COST network Data Matters: Sociotechnical Challenges of European Migration and Border Control and a co-leader of its WG1.