A01=Martina Cvajner
assimilation
Author_Martina Cvajner
belonging
caregivers
Category=JBFH
Category=JBSF1
Category=JHB
Category=NHD
change
community
consumption
courtship
discovery
displacement
elder care
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnography
europe
exile
family
foreign workers
gender
history
identity
immigration
isolationism
italy
love
marriage
materialism
migration
nation
nonfiction
politics
rebuilding
refugee
reinvention
respectability
sexuality
sociology
soviet union
transformation
trauma
women
Product details
- ISBN 9780226662398
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 22 Oct 2019
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Across the Western world, the air is filled with talk of immigration. The changes brought by immigration have triggered a renewed fervor for isolationism able to shutter political traditions and party systems. So often absent from these conversations on migration are however the actual stories and experiences of the migrants themselves. In fact, migration does not simply transport people. It also changes them deeply. Enter Martina Cvajner's Soviet Signoras, a far-reaching ethnographic study of two decades in the lives of women who migrated to northern Italy from several former Soviet republics.
Cvajner details the personal and collective changes brought about by the experience of migration for these women: from the first hours arriving in a new country with no friends, relatives, or existing support networks, to later remaking themselves for their new environment. In response to their traumatic displacement, the women of Soviet Signoras--nearly all of whom found work in their new Western homes as elder care givers--refashioned themselves in highly sexualized, materialistic, and intentionally conspicuous ways. Cvajner's focus on overt sexuality and materialism is far from sensationalist, though. By zeroing in on these elements of personal identity, she reveals previously unexplored sides of the social psychology of migration, coloring our contemporary discussion with complex shades of humanity.
Martina Cvajner is assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Trento.
