'Gratitude or Solidarity? Domestic Work in the Humanitarian Arena in the Czech Republic'

In her lecture, Petra Ezzeddine analyzed the role and social meaning of migrant domestic work in the contemporary „solidarity initiatives of the humanitarian arena“ (Redfield 2013, Rozakou 2016) and „migration policies of compassion“ (Fassin 2008) during the war in Ukraine. By using the case study of the Czech Republic, she showed how domestic work was negotiated as a specific form of „economy of gratitude“ (Hochschild, 2012) by public and social media, state, NGOs, host households and by female Ukrainian refugees themselves. The following questions were discussed: Where does (un)paid reproductive work begin and end in the case of solidarity housing? Why, how and who determines ideas, working conditions and moral and monetary value of domestic work provided by hosted Ukrainian female refugees in a solidarity housing? In conclusion, she pointed to the context of the long-standing and systematicaly marginalized, ethnicized and gendered situation of Ukrainian women in the Czech Republic (Ezzeddine 2019, Uhde and Ezzeddine 2020), that is a result of specific regional and structural inequalities of social reproduction (Dutchak 2020).