The employment of migrant nannies in the UK: negotiating social class in an open market for commoditised in-home care

Migrant women are important sources of labour in the commoditised in-home childcare sector in many regions of the UK. Jobs in this sector, which include nannies as well as au pairs, babysitters, housekeepers and mothers' helps, are often low paid and low status with pay and conditions being determined by employers' circumstances and whims. This article draws on primary data and secondary sources to illustrate the ways in which employers compare migrant nannies with British nannies and other childcare workers in terms of the social class and formal education levels of different groups, with the aim of explaining why migrants are perceived as high-quality candidates for what are often low-paid, low-status jobs. I argue that employers negotiate inter-class relations in this gendered form of employment by understanding their relationship with the migrant nannies they have employed in the context of broader global inequalities—these inequalities are then reproduced and reaffirmed in private homes and across UK culture and society

Migration timespaces: a Heideggerian approach to understanding the mobile being of Eastern Europeans in Scotland

This paper studies timespaces of migrants from Eastern Europe, who come to settle to Scotland. Using philosophical analysis from Martin Heidegger’s works (Being and time, The Yster, Contributions to philosophy), it develops a broader conceptualisation of timespaces, which moves beyond ‘neatly mappable’ life course geographies of migration. It uses relational understanding of time-space, situatedness and potentiality of movement to develop an ‘integrative’ approach which brings together objective and subjective timespaces of migration