Asma Ben Hadj Hassen
Scientific Career
- 2021 MA African Studies, Centre d’anthropologie, Sousse University, Tunisia
- 2019 Erasmus exchange, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Germany
2017 MA French Studies
Work Experience
- 2021-2022 Research assistant - Mixed Migration Centre
- 2020 Research assistant - The Future Migration Scenarios for Europe
- 2020 Research assistant - University of Tilburg
Ph.D. Project
An ethnography of migrant Ivorian domestic workers in and through Tunisia
This research will investigate the experiences and trajectories of Ivorian domestic workers in and through Tunisia and the broader relations of power that underpin this kind of labour. More generally, through an intersectional approach, it will explore how social categorisations such as class, ethnicity, nationality and gender affect these women's everyday experiences, practices, positionalities and agency in the different spaces they traverse, namely in a South-South-North migration context. It also aims to understand how legal insecurity and migration projects shape precarious domestic labour for an Ivorian migrant in and through Tunisia. I plan to engage with anthropological literature on migrant labour, domestic/care work, gender, race and precarity.
Through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with Ivorian migrant domestic workers in Tunisia Ivory Coast and France, I will explore how migrant workers experience, navigate, and resist in a labour market shaped by: a) a gendered division in that women and men are assigned to historically and socially hierarchical jobs b) class division because these domestic workers are usually middle-class or poor and employed in the homes of wealthy families; c) an ethnic division because these domestic workers are racialised migrants.