Education as a platform for migration: the case of Albanian female students
15 January 2020 | 13h30-14h30 | ISCTE-IUL

 

Sala C2.01, Ed. II, Iscte

Post-communist international migration in Albania has been considered to be a male-dominated phenomenon, particularly during the first post-communist decade, 1990–2000, when men migrated for economic reasons. Women remained in Albania, moving internally to care for their families, and only later on migrating abroad for family reunification purposes. However, post-2000 migration data points to a shift: the gap between male and female migrants who leave Albania to migrate abroad has become insignificant. Various scholars have shown that women’s participation in Albanian migration processes is more complex than apparent in the macro-scale studies.  The primary goal in my research was to provide more in-depth knowledge of women’s experiences and their roles in migration processes in Albania.

This presentation focusses on the experiences of internal and international female student migrants. Student migration in Albania has been analysed mostly statistically, a perspective that often hides the peculiarities of the experiences. As well, the analyses have often focussed only on the educational dimension of migration leaving aside the intersection with other gendered experiences. The interviews with these young women showed that although education as a passport to a better job was chief among the reasons pushing them to migrate, other reasons were also significant. Migrating to study was for them a socially accepted way to escape the constraining gender norms and expectations in their hometowns.


Ermira Danaj
Sociologist, Researcher on Gender Studies
Visiting researcher at CIES-IUL

 

 


 

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