The Re(production) of Restless Bodies: Freedom of Movement and Social Reproduction

Abstract

The article develops the notion of restless bodies to explore the interaction between regimes of social reproduction and freedom of movement. The notion captures the methodological difficulty to account for ‘return migration’ and goes beyond the isolation of a singular migration determinant. The author relies on two empirical cases. The first draws on one hundred interviews with ‘return migrants’ in Bulgaria. The second is based on fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2015 in Germany. Both show how the political economy of movement is characterised by a contradiction between fixity and motion in the context of capital accumulation and fading welfare state. The concerns at hand are raised both because of their methodological importance but also as a potential instrument that could supplement ongoing policy debates in the field of EU social security portability coordination.

The chronos of class conflict. The relevance of the temporal dimension in conflicts related to labour migration

“…While workers with citizenship might also face hardships in this regard, migrants are often situated between welfare regimes. Such migrants therefore find themselves in a particularly unprotected labour market situation and might resort to informal labour or permanent circular migration (Apostolova 2021).…”

“…Second, I want to make a case for situating labour migration within its context of social reproduction (Bakker & Gill 2003;Bhattacharya 2017;Mezzadri 2020) in order to highlight how paid wage labour is embedded in social activities and networks such as households, families, and communities and shaped by the social, developmental, and migratory policies that condition workers' labour market inclusion. While the organisation of social reproduction is complicated for all workers, migrant workers face particular spatial and temporal challenges, since their reproductive activities often need to be coordinated transnationally (Apostolova 2021).…”

Refugees’ (In)dependency Conundrum: Obstructed Social Reproduction Activities and Unpaid Labour in Refugee Camps

“…The article builds on feminist geography on social reproduction (Katz 2001;Mitchell et al 2012), on migration scholarship that discusses biopolitical technologies over refugees' lives (Brankamp 2022;Ilcan and Rygiel 2015;Pinelli 2018), and on camp geographies literature that draws attention to everyday life in camps and social reproduction activities (Bagelman and Gitome 2021;Katz et al 2018;Ramadan 2013;Weima and Minca 2022). Scholars have foregrounded the continuum between low-paid and unpaid migrant labour (Anderson 2000;Apostolova 2021; Kofman and Raghuram 2015) and the invisible exploitation of migrant domestic workers and care workers (Guti errez-Rodr ıguez 2010; Kofman 2012). Yet, little has been said about how social reproduction activities are disrupted in the field of refugee humanitarianism and, more specifically, how asylum policies choke and impact on migrants also by obstructing their autonomous spaces of liveability (but see Rigo 2022;Silvius 2020).…”

“…2018; Ramadan 2013; Weima and Minca 2022). Scholars have foregrounded the continuum between low‐paid and unpaid migrant labour (Anderson 2000; Apostolova 2021; Kofman and Raghuram 2015) and the invisible exploitation of migrant domestic workers and care workers (Gutiérrez‐Rodríguez 2010; Kofman 2012). Yet, little has been said about how social reproduction activities are disrupted in the field of refugee humanitarianism and, more specifically, how asylum policies choke and impact on migrants also by obstructing their autonomous spaces of liveability (but see Rigo 2022; Silvius 2020).…”