Emma Strollo - PhD student

PhD projeect:

My PhD project revolves around the life stories and narratives of German born women about their life and work as domestic workers in Swedish homes during the 1950’s. In Sweden after the second world war all women who weren’t born in the Nordic counties were required to work as domestic workers for two years before they were allowed to seek other work. Even though labor migration to Sweden until the middle of the 1950’s consisted of 55 percent women, the female labor migration is an unexplored field in Sweden. For my dissertation I have interviewed 19 women that came to Sweden from Germany to work as domestic workers in Swedish homes, women who later chose to remain in Sweden. An intersectional perspective is used both to analyze the structural power mechanisms that influenced the women’s life possibilities and also to investigate closer intersections of identities in the women’s narratives. I am interested in creating a methodological framework inspired by feminist oral history and narrative analysis to explore meaning and context in the women’s life stories. My research field can also be connected to more recent debates about domestic work, migration and the international division of reproductive work.

Fields of interest:

I am interested in intersectional power structures and identities – especially at the crossroads of the private/public. Fields of interests are feminist theory, methods and knowledge production, feminist post colonial theory, narrative theory and oral history.

Selected publications:

Strollo, Emma, (2009), 'Från pigjobb till hushållsnära tjänster: ett historiskt perspektiv', Arbetarhistoria., (33):1-2, s. 21-28