Vortrag der Reihe „WISO-Morgenkolloquium“ des Inst. für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte der Univ. Wien (PDF)

Time: Mi., 29.05.2024, 9.00-10.00 Uhr
Venue: Univ. Wien, Seminarraum WISO 1, Stiege 6, 2. ZG – and virtual space

Olimpia Capitano’s research project is a case study concerning the experience of Cape Verdean, Eritrean, Ethiopian and Filipino paid domestic workers in Rome between 1970 and 1989. She decided to focus on these immigration groups because they were the protagonists of the first and largest flows to Italy and to Rome. Capitano chose the 1970s and 1980s because they preceded the great wave of migration in the early 1990s – moving the periodization forward would have implied also considering the flows that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall. She interrogated the domestic environment as a place of paid work and as a frontier space.
Capitano’s reference sources are mainly oral sources (about ninety interviews). However, she also used many types of other sources from archives. The research is situated within a broad literature of historical and gender studies and aims to deconstruct the rigid division between the separate spheres of public and private. To do so, Capitano took the perspective of paid domestic work, which is particularly effective in showing how the intimate spaces of the home, the local, the national and the global interact and construct each other. Capitano started from studies on the formation and development of a global market for domestic and care work and sought to re-discuss them through the theoretical and methodological propositions of labor history and global labor history, especially the WORCK network (Web) and the groups “Intersecting marginalities” and “Sites and fields of coercion”.
This initial research setting was conceived both in relation to a reasoning about new ways of thinking and doing (domestic) labor history and as a response to the persistent non-recognition of domestic work as “real” work. A dense net of labor and social power relations that unite the domestic space and what lies outside of it emerged. These relationships are often ambiguous and traversed by a wide and nuanced spectrum of coercive dynamics (and strategies for responding to them).
So, the central (and concatenated) questions are: how do the public and private concretely interact and how can we observe their continuous exchange and deconstruct the separate spheres? If we take the perspective of paid domestic work and Continue reading →