Education

Work Experience

Research Experience

Teaching Experience

Entangled Inequalities and Network Building. Organizational Experiences of Paid Domestic Workers in Uruguay and Paraguay

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Sérgio Costa (FU Berlin)

My research focuses on paid domestic workers’ organizations in Uruguay and Paraguay, more specifically, the networks they build with different types of actors within and across national borders. Analyzing data from interviews, participant observations, press articles and documents produced by the workers’ organizations and their allies, the study reconstructs the development of domestic workers’ organizations and the introduction of their claims into the political agenda on a national level from 2005 onwards, which linked them to a broader transnational context.

The analytical framework establishes a dialogue between literature on social movements and social inequalities. Drawing on the characteristics and specificities of domestic work, the research discusses how structural and contextual particularities shape the organizational experiences of domestic workers. More specifically, it analyzes how the entanglements of different axes, dimensions and scales of inequality that cut across this occupational field shape the networks they build, their interventions, and the way in which they present their claims. Different perspectives are thus combined in order to address questions about the interaction between actors’ agency and limitations of the social structure.

I argue that the confluence of inequalities in the experience of domestic workers has an ambivalent effect on them, oscillating between discrimination and political agency. These relations of inequality have an impact on the involvement of different actors in their network of activism, affecting the dynamics within the network as well. In this sense, the differences among actors do not disappear when a coalition is formed, but they remain present although the (re)production of inequalities can be mitigated or subverted. The contrasting of different cases (Uruguay and Paraguay) highlights that, although the general dynamic is the same – inasmuch as inequalities that cut across domestic work tend to originate in the same regimes – it takes place in a context with its own characteristics, and each particular sounding board makes the same chords resonate with different tones depending on the interpretation of the local actors.

Articles in Scientific Journals

• (2015) "Por su propio bien. Condicionalidad y la imagen de la población pobre en políticas

sociales", in Novapolis, Vol. 8, p. 73-101. (ISBN: 2077-5172)

• (2014) "Programa de Transferencias Monetarias Condicionadas: ¿Puerta de entrada a derechos sociales? Un análisis a partir del Programa Tekoporã" , in Revista del Instituto de Ciencias Sociales REVICSO, Vol. 1, p. 37-57. (ISSN/ISBN: 2409-1189)
• (2009) "Le changement de gouvernement au Paraguay: le rôle de la gauche et les défis un an aprés la victoire de l'alternance", in Contradictions, Vol. 125, p. 109-120. (ISSN/ISBN: 0770-8521)

Online articles/ Working papers

• (2015) "El programa de Transferencias Monetarias Condicionadas Tekoporã en Paraguay: ¿Lucha contra la pobreza y desigualdad o por espacios de poder político", in Manuel Góngora Mera, Sérgio Costa, Guilherme Leite Gonçalves (eds.) Derecho en América Latina, ¿corrector o (re)productor de desigualdades?, Working Paper desiguALdades.net Vol. 81, p. 160-179
• (2011) Observatorio Sindical 2010, CEEP Germinal, Vol. 4 (with Marcello Lachi and Christian Cartagena Vidal)
• (2010) Observatorio Sindical 2009, CEEP Germinal, Vol. 3 (with Marcello Lachi and Christian Cartagena Vidal)
• (2009) Observatorio Sindical 2008, CEEP Germinal, Vol. 2 (with Marcello Lachi and Guillermo Rojas Brítez)
• (2008) Observatorio Sindical 2007, CEEP Germinal, Vol. 1 (with Marcello Lachi and Aníbal Benítez)