GEN-MIGRA: Gender, mobilities and migration during and post COVID-19 pandemic - vulnerability, resilience and renewal

The COVID-19 pandemic has represented a major global health challenge with serious economic, social and consequences for migrants and their families transnationally. For many migrants, international mobility is an adaptive response to social risks and inequalities and existing evidence shows that women in particular have been significantly impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. Migrant women are often engaged in essential sectors of the labour market that were hardest hit, such as healthcare, agriculture and the food industry, which are often low paid and precarious. Women migrants have had their mobility restricted and this has posed additional challenges to their care roles, safety and well-being. An additional layer of vulnerability for women migrants has been added by gender-based discrimination and violence, including in the context of the Ukraine war. Lockdowns, quarantines as border closures and increasing police control have provided contexts for increased violence and exploitation, especially for those with insecure legal status or limited access to resources or those forced to move.

GEN-MIGRA is an interdisciplinary, ground-breaking project that will transform our knowledge about the processes of gendered international mobilities and the increasing inequalities and vulnerabilities created by the pandemic, and more recently war in Europe, as well as identify global solutions for recovery. It will work across several countries, mainly Brazil, UK, Germany and Poland, to explore how women involved in international and internal mobilities have faced gendered vulnerabilities resulting from the pandemic. The project aims to foster new transnational understandings of how to overcome the effects of structural inequalities in times of crisis by adopting an intersectional, comparative, transnational approach. It will theorize the interface between vulnerabilities and migrant women's agency in resource mobilization and help us understand the effects of national policy responses on this group. GEN-MIGRA will also work with policy makers, migrants' groups and the general public, aiming to increase political and public awareness on the situation of migrant women and their social protection needs. Based on ground-breaking research with women engaged in international mobilities and their community and kinship networks, the project will identify evidence-informed solutions to facilitate the availability and accessibility of gender-responsive policy interventions and social protection schemes for migrant women and their families.

This project will adopt a transnational and comparative approach in order to explore how the global nature of the pandemic has impacted transnational patterns of mobility for women migrants, in the context of varied national responses to the crisis. The analytical approach adopted focuses on the multiple vulnerabilities, the agency and resources that migrant women have mobilised through community based networks, in order to navigate situations of crisis. Our aim is to explore how migrant women have produced movements of resistance and renewal, changing mobility decisions, strategising and repositioning themselves in the labour market and the implications of all these decisions for family life. We will explore this through a transnational, ethnographic analysis of specific situations in at least four countries with diverse positions regarding social protection, to acquire empirically grounded and theoretically driven knowledge on the impact of national policies that have had a varied outcome for migrants' social protection, including tangible and intangible resources that have helped migrant women to deal with the new social risks they have faced. Data will include in-depth interviews with women and their children and other family members left behind, focus groups, interviews with stakeholders, analysis of existing policy and datasets on migration trends and existing surveys.