Organizing the Unorganized: Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon
Organizing the Unorganized: Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon

Author: Farah Kobaissy

Publisher: American University in Cairo Press

Published: 2017-03-01

Total Pages: 139

ISBN-13: 1617978531

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This study examines the process of unionizing domestic workers in Lebanon, highlighting the potentialities as well as the obstacles confronting it, and looks at the multiple power relations involved through axes of class, gender, race, and nationality. The author situates this struggle within the larger scene of the labor union 'movement' in the country, and discusses the contribution of women's rights organizations in rendering visible cases of abuse against migrant domestic workers. She argues that the 'death' of class politics has made women's rights organizations address migrant domestic worker issues as a separate labor category, further contributing to their production as an 'exception' under neoliberalism.

Social networks, collective organizing, and freedom of association: A qualitative participatory action research study with women migrant domestic workers in Lebanon
Social networks, collective organizing, and freedom of association: A qualitative participatory action research study with women migrant domestic workers in Lebanon

Author: Abdulrahim, Sawsan

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2023-06-02

Total Pages: 36

ISBN-13:

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Worldwide, women migrant domestic workers (WMDWs) occupy a weak position in the global economy due to intersections of gender, race, and global economic inequalities. Lebanon hosts more than 250,000 WMDWs who are recruited and employed through the infamous Kafala system that binds a worker to one employer. With Lebanon’s economic crisis, a large number of WMDWs are currently working as freelancers whereby giving and receiving support from other workers plays a crucial role in their adaptation and economic survival. This study is a component of an international evaluation of the Work in Freedom Project carried out by the International Labour Organization. It focuses on Lebanon and aims to assess the impact of the project on the ability of WMDWs in Lebanon to maintain viable social networks and organize collectively. Its main objective is to investigate the different ways in which WMDWs have maintained social networks and engaged in collective organizing efforts (at the individual, meso- and macro-levels), to improve their lives and to ensure non-exploitative work conditions.

Ethiopian Migrant Domestic Workers
Ethiopian Migrant Domestic Workers

Author: Bina Fernandez

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-08-06

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 303024055X

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This book tells the stories of the Ethiopian women who migrate to work as domestic workers in the Middle East. Drawing on qualitative research in Ethiopia, Lebanon and Kuwait, the author reveals how women’s aspirations to migrate are constituted within unequal gendered structures of opportunity in Ethiopia and asks us to consider how gender, race, class and nationality intersect in the construction of migrant subjectivities and agency. By analysing the impact of migration on social reproduction both in Ethiopia and the destination countries, the book offers fresh empirical and theoretical insights into the largest stream of women’s autonomous international migration from Africa.

International Migration in the Euro-Mediterranean Region
International Migration in the Euro-Mediterranean Region

Author: Ibrahim Awad

Publisher: American University in Cairo Press

Published: 2019-05-20

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1617979228

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This issue of Cairo Papers takes up the various dimensions of migration and refugees in the Euro-Mediterranean region over different periods in the last two centuries. It looks at both the migration of waves of Italians and Greeks to Egypt from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, and at migration from the Arab southern and eastern rims of the Mediterranean to Europe starting in the twenty-first century. The disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, and political science have been mobilized to undertake the research its chapters embody. They address the history of migration in the region, relations between Mediterranean countries of origin and their diasporas, the impact of interest groups on the formulation of migration policies in countries of destination, and the policies for integration of recent flows arriving in Europe. The chapters are based on papers delivered at Cairo Papers 25th annual symposium in collaboration with the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies.

Sextarianism
Sextarianism

Author: Maya Mikdashi

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2022-05-03

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1503631567

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The Lebanese state is structured through religious freedom and secular power sharing across sectarian groups. Every sect has specific laws that govern kinship matters like marriage or inheritance. Together with criminal and civil laws, these laws regulate and produce political difference. But whether women or men, Muslims or Christians, queer or straight, all people in Lebanon have one thing in common—they are biopolitical subjects forged through bureaucratic, ideological, and legal techniques of the state. With this book, Maya Mikdashi offers a new way to understand state power, theorizing how sex, sexuality, and sect shape and are shaped by law, secularism, and sovereignty. Drawing on court archives, public records, and ethnography of the Court of Cassation, the highest civil court in Lebanon, Mikdashi shows how political difference is entangled with religious, secular, and sexual difference. She presents state power as inevitably contingent, like the practices of everyday life it engenders, focusing on the regulation of religious conversion, the curation of legal archives, state and parastatal violence, and secular activism. Sextarianism locates state power in the experiences, transitions, uprisings, and violence that people in the Middle East continue to live.

On Friendship between the No Longer and the Not Yet: An Ethnographic Account
On Friendship between the No Longer and the Not Yet: An Ethnographic Account

Author: Soha Mohsen

Publisher: American University in Cairo Press

Published: 2020-10-07

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1649030673

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There is a great deal to be said about ideas and imaginations of the “future” when one does not have the luxury of maintaining a slot in the present. In the midst of acute conditions of precarity and structural violences and vulnerabilities of different forms (political, economic, social, infrastructural) and magnitudes, Egyptians find ways to adapt and adjust, even experiment, with different arrangements and forms of connectedness. By following, tracing, and accompanying friends and networks of friendship in and across Egypt’s two biggest cities, Cairo and Alexandria, this ethnographic account aims to highlight some of the contemporary meanings, forms, and purposes of friendship among young Egyptians with the aim of renewing and reviving the question, “What can friendships do?” Against a backdrop of conditions of precarity and the ruins of finance capitalism, this study examines the manifestations of how the relationship of friendship manages to re-invent and re-define itself. Moreover, it asks whether new modes of relationality, companionship, and intimacy can be cultivated and practiced given the current neoliberal conditions of living. The questions that this study attempts to open up are focused on the re-workings, reconfigurations, and re-makings of practices of sociality and intimacy between friends.

Biographies of Port Said: Everydayness of State, Dwellers, and Strangers
Biographies of Port Said: Everydayness of State, Dwellers, and Strangers

Author: Mostafa Mohie

Publisher: American University in Cairo Press

Published: 2021-03-03

Total Pages: 147

ISBN-13: 164903069X

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A study of how the city of Port Said was created, and its spaces mutually produced and transformed through the practices of both dwellers and the state Founded in 1859, as part of the Suez Canal project and named after Khedive Said, the city of Port Said has always stood at the juncture of global, national, and local networks of forces, the city itself a reflection of many layers of Egypt’s modern history, from its colonial past through to the eras of national liberation and neoliberalism. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s and Henri Lefebvre’s conceptual works, this study examines how the ‘social’ (encompassing all aspects of human life—the political, the economic, and the social) of the city of Port Said was created, and how its spaces were mutually produced and transformed through the practices of both dwellers and the state. Looking also at the temporality of these processes, Mostafa Mohie examines three key moments: al-tahgir (the forced migration that followed the outbreak of the 1967 war and remained until 1974, when Port Saidians were permitted to return to their homes following the 1973 October War); the declaration of the free trade zone in the mid-1970s; and the Port Said Stadium massacre in 2012.

Understanding the Public Sector in Egyptian Cinema: A State Venture
Understanding the Public Sector in Egyptian Cinema: A State Venture

Author: Tamara Chahine Maatouk

Publisher: American University in Cairo Press

Published: 2019-11-04

Total Pages: 87

ISBN-13: 1617979244

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In 1957 the public sector in Egyptian cinema was established, followed shortly by the emergence of public-sector film production in 1960, only to end eleven years later, in 1971. Assailed with negativity since its demise, if not earlier, this state adventure in film production was dismissed as a complete failure, financially, administratively and, most importantly, artistically. Although some scholars have sporadically commented on the role played by this sector, it has not been the object of serious academic research aimed at providing a balanced, nuanced general assessment of its overall impact. This issue of Cairo Papers hopes to address this gap in the literature on Egyptian cinema. After discussion of the role played by the public sector in trying to alleviate the financial crisis that threatened the film industry, this study investigates whether there was a real change in the general perception of the cinema, and the government’s attitude toward it, following the June 1967 Arab–Israeli war.