Badanti on the Edge. Networks beyond frontiers in domestic eldercare. An ethnographic study of migrant women workers and contemporary families in Italy.

The study focuses on the increasing presence of migrant women mainly from the Eastern Europe in the structure of domiciliary care for the elderly in Italy. It illustrates how migrant networking practices can complement or indeed replace traditional family networks in order to uphold the social cohesion of italian society. This evolution of the domestic life is linked to the socio-economic effects of globalisation and has to be read as part of the exploitative mechanism of global market forces. Pivoting on the women' chance of transfer abroad their care-giving skills as well as on their responsibility towards the economic needs of their own families, the global market of women labor comes to fit with the processes of social change within Italy. Here the growing female presence on the labor market has not been compensated by a corresponding care-work asssumption by the welfare or by the male partners or relatives. The phenomenon, however, deserved to be read through the ethnographic approach, which enables us to show how the multiculturalist dimension of such cultural encounters at the level of everyday social relationships, actually challenges and transforms the cultural frontiers between caregivers and the families where they work, negotiating new symbolic boundaries.