Heidi Gottfried

For centuries, migration has toggled between being seen as an opportunity for some and a curse for others. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, migration from Europe to South and Southeast Asia, North and South America, and Africa offered new resources, land, and opportunity to European immigrants. But these same migration flows meant conquest, land dispossession, disease, violence, and (in some cases) total cultural annihilation for native populations...

Michael’s graduate studies course on ethnography at the University of Wisconsin inspired my own initial research efforts to integrate feminism and the micro-foundations of a Gramscian Marxism in a study of “Flexibility as a Mode of Regulation in the Temporary Service Industry.” His inspiration extended well beyond the merely theoretical, providing practical support for my first ethnographic...

In the wake of Germany and Japan’s high growth miracles and economic expansion women advanced in higher education, yet changes in their employment patterns remained limited, punctuated by high levels of part-time work among mothers, persistently large gender pay gaps, and continued burdens of unpaid care; a pattern that was exacerbated during the pandemic. Recent policy initiatives aimed at the organization of care are resulting in “converging...

The study of care is at the center of contemporary debates about the stakes of social, political, and economic transformations taking place in the world today. An unprecedented number of women swept up in the human flow of crossing borders in search of work reproduces new and existing patterns of inequality along class, gender, racial, and national lines. The “crisis of care” raises concerns about the costs and consequences of a profoundly uneven...