Gender, Family, and Adaptation of Migrants in Europe

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

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2. Introduction: Uncertain Biographies? A Focus on Migrants’ Life Courses

   • Ionela Vlase, Bogdan Voicu

   Pages 1-12

3. Life Strategies and Life-Choices Depending on Social Context

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 13-13

      PDF

   2. Fringed Life Satisfaction? A Life-Course Perspective on the Impact of International Migration on Subjective Well-Being

      • Bogdan Voicu

      Pages 15-39

   3. ‘Walking Alongside’ Polish Migrants in Ireland: Individual Life Courses in the Context of Political, Social, and Economic Change

      • Justyna Salamońska

      Pages 41-65

   4. ‘And we are still here’: Life Courses and Life Conditions of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese Retirees in Switzerland

      • Claudio Bolzman, Giacomo Vagni

      Pages 67-89

4. Work and Labor Market

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 91-91

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   2. Gendered Migratory Pathways: Exploring the Work Trajectories of Long-Term Romanian Migrants

      • Alin Croitoru

      Pages 93-115

   3. Fragmented Careers, Gender, and Migration During the Great Recession

      • Francesca Alice Vianello

      Pages 117-138

5. Gender and Family

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 139-139

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   2. Immigration, Transition to Parenthood, and Parenting

      • Anca Bejenaru

      Pages 141-169

   3. Women’s Stories of Migration: Youth, Personal Agency, and Linked Lives

      • Ana Maria Preoteasa

      Pages 171-193

   4. Men’s Migration, Adulthood, and the Performance of Masculinities

      • Ionela Vlase

      Pages 195-225Open Access

   5. Conclusion: Setting Up an Agenda for Life-Course Perspective in International Migration

      • Bogdan Voicu, Ionela Vlase

      Pages 227-234

6. Back Matter

   Pages 235-241

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This volume documents the life uncertainties revealed by migrants’ biographies. For international migrants, life journeys are less conventional or patterned, while their family, work, and educational trajectories are simultaneously more fragmented and intermingled. The authors discuss the challenges faced by migrants and returnees when trying to make sense of their life courses after years of experience in other countries with different age norms and cultural values. The book also examines the ways to reconcile competing cultural expectations of both origin and destination societies regarding the timing of transitions between roles to provide a meaningful account of their life courses. Migration is, itself, a major life event, with profound implications for the pursuit of migrants’ life goals, organization of family life, and personal networks, and it can affect, to a considerable degree, their subjective well-being.

Chapter 9 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. 

• Immigration
• Gender
• Family
• Parenthood
• Age
• Social Relationships
• Adulthood
• Economic Change
• Migration
• Europe
• International
• Romania
• Poland
• Ireland
• Wellbeing

“Migration has become a major political issue. It stirs up basic dimensions of human existence: identity, social position, gender, agency, privilege and discrimination, well-being, but also social context: institutional reactions, racist reactions, accessibility and closure. With its life-course approach to individual and contextual aspects of migration and also remigration, this volume provides a timely effort at putting this complexity into an integrative perspective.” (René Levy, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Lausanne, Switzerland)

“This book contributes to fill the gap of knowledge on the effects from migration on migrants’ lives themselves. A very new insight is the fact that a life course perspective on migrants’ trajectories during the economic crisis in Europe can explain why for non-EU migrants naturalization in the country of arrival became a solution to save their migration careers and that experiences of career fragmentation might create space for the renegotiation of gender identities.” (Ursula Apitzsch, Professor, Goethe University, Germany)

• ‘Lucian Blaga’ University of Sibiu, Sibiu, Romania

  Ionela Vlase, Bogdan Voicu

Ionela Vlase is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania.


Bogdan Voicu is Professor of Sociology at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania, and First Degree Research Fellow with Romanian Academy, Research Institute for Quality of Life. 

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