Sara Hayyat

Geographical Area:

Spain

Current Project:

Divine Tactics in Gendered Labour: An Ethnography of Female Seasonal Workers in Spain

This project delves into the politics of migration, focusing on labor migration regimes and the lives of Moroccan female agricultural workers in Southern Spain. It underscores how migrant lives reveal the limitations of contemporary control-oriented migration management regimes. The study argues that the desire for control is often displaced in the everyday presence and practices of female workers. It explores the dialectics of violence as a spatio-temporal configuration that not only manifests marginalization but is also potentially generative, innovative, and destabilizing. The research unfolds across three dimensions: (1) Examining how the EU's migration policies operate in the realm of gendered labor, punctuating conditions of exploitation and violence. (2) Investigating the socio-economic expandability of female migrant workers and the dynamics inducing vulnerabilities. (3) Scrutinizing resistive minutiae in everyday life, specifically tactics challenging the peripheral location of female workers. The study focuses on shantytowns where Moroccan female workers reside, emphasizing the importance of visibility and invisibility, the uneven spatio-temporal configuration of migrant lives, and how migrant desires exceed normative expectations.