Rutgers University Press
Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal
Key Metrics
- Celeste Vaughan Curington
- Rutgers University Press
- Paperback
- 9781978827950
- -
- -
- Business & Economics > Labor - General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender and Care Work in Portugal examines the everyday lives of an African descendant care service workforce that labors in an ostensibly anti-racial Europe and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire. While much of the literature on global care work has focused on Asian and Latine migrant care workers, there is comparatively less research that explicitly examines African care workers and their migration histories to Europe. Sociologist Celeste V. Curington focuses on Portugal--a European setting with comparatively liberal policies around family settlement and naturalization for migrants. In this setting, rapid urbanization in the late twentieth century, along with a national push to reconcile work and family, have shaped the growth of paid home care and cleaning service industries. Many researchers focus on informal work settings where immigrant rights are restricted, and many workers are undocumented or without permanent residence status. Curington instead examined workers who have accessed citizenship or permanent residence status and also explores African women's experiences laboring in care and service industries in the formal market, revealing how deeply colonial and intersectional logics of a racialized and international division of reproductive labor in Portugal render these women hyper-invisible and hyper-visible as appropriate workers in Lisbon.
Author Bio
Celeste Vaughan Curington is Assistant Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University.
Celeste received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and a 2016-2017 American Sociological Association Minority Fellow. Her several lines of research examine race, class and gender through the lens of care labor and migration, family, housing and assortative mating. Her published work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and the London School of Economics USAPP American Politics and Policy Blog, as well as in several media outlets such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, and NBC.
Her dissertation ethnography centered on the position of African transnational migrants to Lisbon, Portugal, at a time of economic crisis, care deficit, and increased anti-immigrant sentiment. She analyzes Cape Verdean eldercare workers’ struggles and resiliencies as paid and unpaid caregivers, migrants, mothers and racialized workers in a former colonial metropole.
Her other areas of research include residential segregation and neighborhood choice, multiracial identity, and online mate selection. She is currently pursuing two collaborative projects - one uses data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (LAFANS) and the US Census to examine the locational attainment of interracial households, and the other is an interview study that centers on interracial couples’ neighborhood choices. Celeste has received support from the American Sociological Association, the National Science Foundation, and the UMass Graduate School.
Source: celestevaughancurington.com
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