The Coloniality of Care in the Euro-Mediterranean Region
28 April 2026. From 18:30 | Conference | English | IEMed
The coloniality of care is a growing yet underexamined phenomenon in contemporary Europe. Since the mid-1990s, European states have relied on migrant women to address structural labour shortages in the care sector, initially drawing heavily on workers from Eastern Europe following EU enlargement. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, however, countries such as United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Portugal have multiplied recruitment agreements with former colonies. The Mediterranean is thus reconfigured as a space of transit that reactivates colonial ties to meet former metropoles’ care demands, disproportionately affecting migrant women exposed to precarity, abuse, and exploitative working conditions.
A lecture by Sara R. Farris, a Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths University of London who has a PhD from the University of Rome La Sapienza.
She has expertise in migration, gender and the political economy of care and social reproduction. Her research is particularly concerned to address: the role that migrant and racialized workers play within economies of care and social reproduction; the financialization and corporatization of care and the racialization of sexism. She is well known internationally for her research on “femonationalism”, or the mobilization of feminist themes by nationalist parties within anti-immigration campaigns.
She is the author of In the Name of Women’s Rights. The Rise of Femonationalism (Duke University Press, 2017) and Max Weber’s Theory of Personality. Individuation, Politics and Orientalism in the Sociology of Religion (Brill 2013), alongside numerous articles in leading journals.
An Aula Mediterrània session co-organised with the IBEI Master’s Degrees and Master’s Degree in Contemporary Migrations, Rights and Social Cohesion, UAB/UB, and moderated by Susana Galán, Ramón y Cajal assistant professor, IBEI, and Sònia Parella, Associate Professor and Director of the Department of Sociology, UAB.
Speakers
Sònia Parella
Associate Professor and Director of the Department of Sociology UABOrganised by
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