CHAPTER FIVE
OVERLAPPING MULTI-CENTRED NETWORKING: MIGRANT WOMEN’S
DIASPORIC NETWORKS AS ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES OF GLOBALISATION
CARLA DE TONA AND RONIT LENTIN
Introduction: Migrant women’s networks in Ireland – what is the question?
During this time we said we’ll work it as a network and from our own understanding and from community development and
from any studies that some of us have done, we actually felt that if we rely on the network it will help. And what we meant
by a network was that we weren’t going to start groups of African women around the country. We were going to encourage
women to form their own groups, that they come and look at their issues, what is bothering them, you know. It’s a national
network … And the strength of the network we felt was that, when we speak, even if these women are not directly speaking,
when we put things onto paper, in submissions, there are the issues that are real, that are happening, in the real lives of
women, women around the country, and that’s why we felt it would be strongest is we work through the network. First
establishing the network of African women, which was actually meant to help women form themselves into small groups
around the country and then deal with the indigenous groups, you know, the Irish groups, for support and sharing which will
make it stronger. And then AkiDwA would be able to facilitate that… (Salome Mgubua, AkiDwA, interview 2005).
Towards the end of her life, [my nonna Maria] couldn’t really talk, so I don’t think my mum would have talked to her on the
phone, but she would have spoken to my auntie, and my auntie would have told my mum how my grandmother was
(Carmela, interview 2003).
Theories of transnationalism (e.g. Portes et al 1999; Vertovec 1999) and more specifically ‘immigrant
transnationalism’ (e.g., Portes 2001) assume a category of migrants who not only ‘live dual lives’ in the sense of living
in more than one country (Portes et al 1999), but who also engage in long-distance, cross-border activities including
migrant labour, ‘back and forth movements’, trans-border entrepreneurship, and ‘cultural and social remittances’
(Reynolds and Zontini 2006). A growing area of interest in sociology and migration studies, networks can be
understood as both sustaining and being a product of migrants’ transnationalism (Portes et al 1999; Castells 2004).
Migrants’ networks are not a new phenomenon nor are network theories new in the social sciences, having proved
useful already in the 1980s to feminist anthropologists who highlighted the meaningful roles of ‘ethnic’ women in
‘meso-level’ interaction, such as networks and households (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Yanagisako 1977; Di Leonardo
2001). In the last decade, there has been a new emphasis on networks (see Castells 2004), often used as a metaphor for
contemporary societies (Holton 2005b). This renewed interest depends, as Stephen Fuchs claims, on the potential of
network theories to grasp the meanings of complex societal relations which characterise contemporary global migratory
scenarios, while remaining ‘empirical’, bypassing both essentialised and deconstructivist epistemological dead-ends
(Fuchs 2001, 332).
In the light of this potential, this chapter, based on initial field research with members of networks of women
migrants in Ireland, explores the potential of researching transnational networks of women migrants.
To understand the migration landscape in Ireland, we need to first highlight the ways immigration has become a key
site of articulating Irishness and otherness since the mid-1990s (Lentin and McVeigh 2006). In 1996, Ireland reached its
‘migration turning point’ and has been a country of in-migration ever since: net migration went from minus 1,900 in
1995 to 31,600 in 2004, peaking in 2002 at 41,300 (Ruhs 2005, 109). According to Central Statistics Office (CSO)
figures, by April 2005 the number of people who do not describe themselves as ‘Irish’ living in the Republic of Ireland
approached 400,000, or 10 per cent of the population, up from 240,000 in the 2002 census – this represents an increase
of 40 per cent. Assuming in-migration continues to grow, the CSO predicts the proportion of foreign-born nationals
should increase to 18 per cent, or one million, by 2030.
The CSO also provides a gender breakdown, according to which, between 2000 and 2005, the numbers of men and
women migrants were more or less equal, even though there are differences in specific categories as the table below
shows.
1
Estimated migration classified by sex and country of origin, 2000-2005 / in 000
Year
M
2000
UK
10.4
Rest
of EU15
4.9
EU10
USA
-
2.8
Rest
of world
8.1
Total
26.2
Net
migration
13.1
10.2
5.0
-
2.7
12.2
30.1
17.5
9.3
4.6
-
2.9
14.4
31.3
18.6
7.6
5.0
-
2.4
10.9
25.9
14.8
6.7
6.3
-
2.6
10.5
26.1
17.0
7.3
4.0
17.6
1.6
8.7
39.1
30.5
10.5
6.8
-
2.7
6.4
26.4
12.9
10.4
5.4
-
4.0
9.3
29.0
15.3
9.8
6.7
-
3.7
15.5
35.6
22.7
6.0
4.7
-
2.3
11.7
24.6
15.0
6.3
6.3
-
2.2
9.2
24.0
14.6
6.4
5.0
8.6
2.8
8.2
30.9
22.9
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
F
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
Source: CSO, Population and migration estimates 2005.
Women are clearly present among the new wave of migration to Ireland. It is also becoming clear that migrant
women employ a variety of resistance strategies to their racialisation by state and society, and that one resistance
strategy is the formation of migrant networks. According to Salome Mgubua, director of AkiDwA (the African
Women’s Network), the main purpose of establishing networks is to make the issue of migrant women more visible in
the Irish system: ‘because at the moment, it’s still very invisible’ (personal interview, 2005).
This chapter is foregrounded by four key theoretical questions. The first asks what is ‘transnational’ and ‘global’
about the networks of migrant women in Ireland. We have initially been studying AkiDwA; a network of Filipino
domestic workers, based in the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland; and various groups of Italian women migrants in Ireland.
This question is critically explored via the literature linking transnationalism, and migration and we concur with
Phizacklea (2000) that theories of transnationalism often neglect class, gender, and other hierarchies within migration
networks. Adding the diaspora link helps us reconceptualise transnationalism – an otherwise ultimately unsatisfactory
theoretical framework. Following Smith and Guarnizo (1998) who distinguish between ‘transnationalism from above’
and ‘transnationalism from below’ (describing immigrant and grassroots organisations), we suggest that the networks
we study are a transnationalism-from-below response to Irish intercultural politics.
The second key question is whether the groups we are studying can be described as ‘networks’ rather than ‘groups’
or ‘coalitions’ – two terms interchangeably used in describing collective migrant activities in the recent Irish context
(see Feldman et al. 2000; Mutwarasibo 2005). Critiquing an understanding of networks as basic units of modern
societies (Castells 2004), we look at networks as a distinguished form of sociability (as advanced by Holton 2005a).
Zygmunt Bauman distinguishes between ‘relations’, ‘partnerships’, and other forms of mutual engagement, and
‘networks’, which stand for a ‘matrix for simultaneously connecting and disconnecting… Network suggests moments of
“being in touch” interspersed with periods of free roaming’ (Bauman 2004, xii). We reflect on our ethnographic data in
light of this fluidity: interviewees speak of willingly entering into more than one network, creating a field of
overlapping multicentred networks, both global and local. Interestingly, initial research also found that migrant
women’s networking activities tend to centre on key actors, creating a concentric networking model (see Holton and
Holton in this volume on the importance of particular actors to the creation of networks).
The third, and perhaps most crucial question for us relates to the gendered nature of the networks we are studying.
2
Engendering, Marsha Meskimmon (1997, 1) argues, ‘is the ideal signifier of making space meaningful through social
structures in which gender difference is always and already present’. While it has been suggested that the global is
masculine and the local feminine (Freeman 2001), we are beginning to discern, in this local Irish context, a new ‘global
femininity’ which challenges and reconfigures the notion of mobility as masculine (Freeman 2001). Our field
observations lead us to suggest that though new technologies enable women migrants to connect globally across
geographical distance – with their home country, but also with other women migrants in their new country and in other
countries – migrant women’s connectivity remains a face-to-face interaction, which is also part of the same global
networking process. A gendered understanding of globalisation is not one in which women’s stories or feminist
movements can be ‘stirred into’ the macropicture; rather it challenges the very constitution of that macropicture
(Freeman 2001). Thus, narrative becomes central to our analysis: as women migrants develop new networks in their
diasporic location, we can observe how they connect narratively, with other women from home and with women from
other homes, subverting notions of national, local, and global.
The fourth question focuses on the specificities of migrant women’s networks in the Irish context which has since
the 1990s arguably developed from an emigrant nursery to a prominent in-migration destination, and where the analysis
of migrants organising, let alone networking, is relatively novel. Following Robbie McVeigh’s (1996) theorisation of
the specificities of Irish racism as related, inter alia, to the ‘warmth of community’, Alana Lentin (2004) suggests that
anti-racism Irish-style also derives from the very same ‘warmth of community’ and therefore tends to be solidaristic,
and organised by white settled Irish people rather than being migrant-led. Lentin and McVeigh (2006) develop this to
critique top-down, state-inspired anti-racism initiatives as emanating from ‘racism without racism’, where the state
simultaneously denies racism and enacts racist immigration controls. In this light, theorising migrant-led transnational
networks is a novel way of understanding social organising in the Irish context.
This chapter is underpinned by proposing that migrant women’s discursive strategies provide alternative narratives
of globalisation (Sassen 2003). We understand narratives both as informing us about counter circuits of globalisation,
and as forming women migrant’s networks. Secondly, by inserting, after Bhabha (1994), the hyphen into transnationalism, we suggest that networking activities of migrant women constitute a counter-narrated space in
contemporary global Ireland. Thirdly, most studies of migrant transnationalism, including feminist ones, aim to produce
a structural description. In this work in progress, using non-participant observation and interviews with key informants,
we are more interested in the meanings produced by network members, including the emergence of overlapping
networking activities in this Irish context, both narratively and materially. Rather than conceive of migrant women’s
networks as ideal type objects, we theorise migrant women’s networking processes. We look at network members’
agency, and ask whether they construct a subversive trans-national space, or rather – through the focus on integration –
consolidate Ireland’s nascent state-inspired ‘interculturalism industry’ (Lentin and McVeigh 2006).
What are ‘global’ migration networks?
Stephen Fuchs claims that the question of what a network is, is wrongly posed; ‘for it is only what it has and will
become’ (Fuchs 2001, 270). This implies that networks, differently from other forms of sociability such as encounters,
groups and organisations, are fluid forms of social association composed of ‘nodes [that] are not, in themselves, fixed
and stable. They are made so by embedding them in relations’ (Fuchs 2001, 252). As a matrix simultaneously connected
and ‘disconnected’, networking sustains migrants’ transnationalism as ‘a process by which immigrants forge and
sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement’ (Basch et al. 1994, cited
by Portes 2001, 183). Transnationalism analyses the linking of immigrant groups in developed countries with their
respective sending nations and hometowns. However, transnationalism is as much a macro-concept as globalisation,
lacking ‘the gendered and often racial matrices in which these processes are embedded’ (Freeman 2001).
Although global networks are not a new phenomenon (migration studies have long discussed chain migrations,
which describe similar phenomena), global network theories are a relatively new theoretical intervention in studying
contemporary transnational migratory activities. Not a set of coherent theories, they often shift between using network
as a metaphor for contemporary societies, as a social theory, and as a method of analysis (Rogers et al. 2001: iii; see
also Holton 2005a). Factors theorised as impinging on global networks include the ease of travel and technological
networking, the increasing role played by migrants in their countries of origin through remittances and family
maintenance, and the increasing marginalisation of migrants in their receiving countries (Levitt 1999, 4). Global
migration networks are ‘dynamic and flexible types of connection between individuals, groups and organisations that
criss-cross the world’ (Rogers et al. 2001, iii). They can be dense or loose, enduring or brittle, and are based on ties,
loyalties, exchange and affiliations. They are ‘interlocking, changing, and multifarious’, and although they are a sign of
‘human accomplishments’ and global openings, they also expose the costs of globalisation (Rogers et al. 2001).
Global network theories are the product of a new globalisation approach that ‘reflects the movement away from
general macroscopic views on globalisation’ (Rogers et al. 2001: iv), calling into question the agency of migrants vis-àvis global structural forces, and highlighting, as Holton suggests, that ‘empirically networks are also assemblages of
people, institutions, social practices, interactions and bodies of knowledge oriented to “problems”’ (Holton 2005a, 212;
emphasis added).
However, not everyone agrees on the relevance of agency. Fuchs, for example, advocates a need to move beyond
thinking of networks in terms of persons and agency, and proposes applying relationalism to networks whose nodes are
not persons (Fuchs 2001). However, the role of agency remains crucial in network analysis, as well as networks’
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structurational nature as a bottom-up response to top-down politics oriented to maximising migrants’ conditions. In
fact, against Portes et al’s (1999, 224) argument that new technologies enable transnational activities without direct
contact (and pace Castells 2004), Holton suggests that face-to-face interaction remains primal as most on-line activity is
not strongly networked beyond ‘mundane interpersonal emails’, and the central question must be how ‘self interest or
some other social orientation… leads to the development of networks’ (Holton 2005a, 213-4).
We are particularly interested in the ways globalisation theories shift their focus from systems and structures to
‘instances of networks of connectivity’ (Holton, 2005a: 209). Global networks have been theorised as conceptualising
the flexibility and trust inscribed in transnational forms of connectivity (Holton 2005a, 215), and as bringing together
the public and private worlds, the forces of macro structures and the agency of individuals (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994;
Phizacklea 2000; Holton 2005a). What is attractive about the metaphor of global networks, Holton further argues, is
that they are ‘multi-centred rather than being organised around a single controlling source’ (Holton 2006; emphasis
added). Bauman’s suggestion, that ‘in a network, connections are entered on demand, and can be broken at will’ (2004,
xii) is useful in re-inserting agency into the field of gendered migration.
Much literature on the migration of women offers typologies and debates women’s reasons for migration, women as
followers versus women as instigators of the migration process, and women migrating within families versus women
leaving families behind. The question of agency has become central to a gendered understating of migration. Indeed,
women’s agency is a key question in our understanding of networks, and we concur with Phizacklea (2003, 33) that it is
through the narratives of women migrants themselves that we can reinsert the actor into theoretical migration
discussions, opening up possibilities for a more dynamic, pro-active view of migration, and a gendered actor-based
critique of globalisation.
The gendering of global migration networks
Before we discuss the gendering of global networks, we want to suggest, following Erel et al. (2003), that a
methodological sensitivity regarding the short-sightedness of universalising discourses on women and on migrants ‘is
often well served by one’s experience as a woman and a migrant’, not only because ‘it is easier to know when and
where the universalising discourse ignores you’ (Erel et al. 2003:19), but also because, as Liz Stanley (1996) reminds
us, experiential knowledge is an added methodological bonus. Thus, we have approached this study, reflexively, as
women migrants ourselves.
Feminist critiques challenge binary models of locality as female versus mobility as male (Freeman 2001) in
accounts of globalisation. Al Ali (2004, 260) calls for accounts of globalisation to include ‘gender, class, political and
religious affiliations, regional origin and personal motivation and resourcefulness to analyse the emergence and
reproductions of migrants’ transnational ties’. However, gendering global networks is not only about ‘adding women
where they are missing’ (Erel et al. 2003, 1), it also implies understanding how connectivity is shaped by gender roles,
how it becomes a gender resource and bears gendered implications. 1
Women’s invisibility in migration studies – side by side with their hypervisibility on streets and in relation to state
policies – owes to the household remaining a central unit of analysis. However, Phizacklea (2003, 31) proposes that
opening the household ‘black box’ demonstrates that the household is ‘only one piece in a very complex jigsaw (which)
cannot be analysed in isolation from social networks and other migrant institutions that support transnational
migration’. Social networks which mediate between individual migrants and larger structural contexts are deeply
implicated in gendered ideologies and redistribution of power (Phizacklea 2000, 12). According to Hondagneu-Sotelo,
men and women have different networks, even when they belong to the same families. While previous network analysis
assumed that women automatically benefited from their husbands’ networks (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994, 7), ‘resources
are not always equally shared and automatically pooled within the household or family unit’, and this is especially true
of immigrants’ social networks (1994, 187).
The influence is two-directional: while gender relations within the family influence migration processes, the process
of migration often realigns patriarchy in the family, ‘as the women, out of necessity, act autonomously and assertively
in managing household affairs’. In the migration process there are differences between single and married women’s
networks, the latter allowing women to circumvent or contest domestic patriarchal authority (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994,
188-9). In the settlement process women are often not waiting to be organised, but rather organise to ‘address problems
specific to their class, gender, ethnic and citizenship status’ (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994, 197).
As Sassen shows, one element of the counter-geography of globalisation is the ‘feminisation of survival… because
it is increasingly women who make a living, create a profit and secure government revenue’ (Sassen 2003, 61). Another
factor in theorising economic and social activities of migrant women is the entry of western middle class women into
paid labour, enabled by globalisation. The ensuing ‘care deficit’ provides an alternative narrative of globalisation
which, inter alia, involves the transfer of the ‘domestic burden’ from western woman to women from developing
countries across continental divides (see Andall 2003; Conroy 2003; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003).
The feminisation of survival and global chains of care sustain the flows and projects of migrant women. However,
migration may also bring about stricter regulation of sexuality and marriage,2 particularly bearing in mind that women
are the signifiers of their collectivities’ cultural boundaries (as argued by Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989). Emerging
data shows that migrant women connect more often with loved ones who stay behind and often compensate for the
4
absence of family support networks by creating alternative networks in their countries of settlement (Al Ali 2004). By
virtue of women’s propensity to transnationally link with their kith and kin, because women are often more inclined to
invest in their children and families than men, migrant women send home a higher proportion of their earnings, and
their remittances are more regular and consistent (UNFPA 2006, 29). Despite the paucity of data, it is also clear that
women’s social remittances tend to be more consistent, and migrant women’s networks allow ideas, skills, attitudes,
and knowledge to travel transnationally, transmitting a new definition of what it means to be female, and promoting
ideas of human rights and gender equality (UNFPA 2006, 29).
In fact, as more women migrate, increasing numbers are establishing their own migrant networks, transferring skills
and resources and transforming notions of appropriate gender behaviour (UNFPA 2006, 30). Networks can consolidate
their ties and nodes and some migrant women’s networks often become structured organisations which support migrant
women globally.3 However, the metaphor of networks remains attractive, and the word ‘network’ is often retained in
the name of migrants’ organisations (as with AkiDwA – the African Women’s Network).
Migrant women’s networks are also attractive because of their fluid capacity to articulate a response to the
racialisation of migrants, often homogenised as undifferentiated by gender, class, and education levels, despite their
obvious heterogeneity, and the resentment, by the white majority, of the issue of racism being raised (c.f. Balibar 1991;
Skrobaneck et al, 1997, 13)
‘The networking started to be like putting up roots’: Migrant women’s networks in the
Irish context
Our initial research suggests that migrant women’s networks in the Irish context do not follow one ideal migrant
network type but rather represent heterogeneous networking processes, which we illustrate with two examples: informal
kin networks of Italian women migrants in Ireland, and the more formal ‘network of networks’ of African women
migrants in Ireland.
Italian women’s networks of care
The Italian women migrants studied by Carla De Tona (2004, 2005, 2006) are an example of a loose and brittle
networking process, often based on a substratum of cohesive kin ties or quasi-kin ties. The relevance of networks has
been highlighted in the literature which looks at the many chain migrations or village-based diasporas characterising
Italian migration (Baldassar forthcoming; Gabaccia 2000; Tomasi et al. 1994). Networks in Italian chain migration
involve long-term obligations, reciprocity, and moral ties, which sustain mutual support across extended and
transnational social networks (Lever-Tracy and Holton 2001). Kith and kin networks also foster the successful
economic and social integration of second generation Italians (Bolzman et al. 2003, 57 in Wessendorf 2006) and
sustained second-generation transnationalism (Wessendorf 2006). However, analyses of Italian migration networks
have often failed to integrate networks with other important factors, such as citizenship policies and political exclusion
(Wessendorf 2006, 7).
Gender has been another striking omission; however, in the Irish context the primary relevance of gender in
structuring kin networks is emerging clearly. Women are traditionally trained to be in charge of what anthropologist
Michaela di Leonardo calls ‘kinwork’:
the conception, maintenance and ritual celebration of cross-household kin ties, including letters, telephone calls, presents and
cards to kin; the organization of holiday gatherings, the creation of quasi-kin relations, decisions to neglect or to intensify
particular ties; the mental work of reflection about all these activities, and the creation and communication of altering images
of family and kin (di Leonardo 2001, 380).
By virtue of this, women have a major and powerful role in networking. Women’s networks can be seen as ‘products of
conscious strategy, as crucial to the functioning of kinship systems, as sources of women’s autonomous power and
possible primary sites of emotional fulfilment and at times as vehicles for actual survival and/or political resistance’ (di
Leonardo 2001, 380). Women’s networking becomes a site of resistance to hegemonic discourses and forms a counterterrain of belonging which has implication for their larger groups. It is their uncommitted and fluid nature that allows
networks to become subversive.
Italian migrant women have an important role in the transnational transmission and remittance of cultural and social
capital, especially by virtue of their role as primary carers and the keepers of their family networks. Transnational
chains of care are supported by reciprocal and multi-directional caring relationships and networks, cross-cutting the
intergenerational closure, extensive trust, and obligations of Italian familism (Baldassar forthcoming; Zontini 2004;
Reynolds and Zontini 2006, 18). In Ireland, diverse and heterogeneous groups of Italian women display a common
pattern of socialisation in care and kin work. Women of all generations and of all waves of migration manifest a marked
propensity, be it obligation or resistance, to these gendered caring roles. Thus the heterogeneous groups of Italian
migrant women form exclusivist and multi-centred networks. The older waves of migration largely composed by chain
migration from the Frosinone Province have more distinct practices of socialisation than the more recent and diversified
waves of migrants (De Tona, 2005, 2006). However, in both categories, women use gendered networks as a resource for
5
support, for bypassing gender constraints exacerbated by the process of migration and for performing transnational care.
The analysis presented here focuses on the older waves of migrants, who have settled in Ireland and consolidated
community institutions and practices such as the Italian Club and the Italian Mass. While there are no distinct
associations of Italian migrant women, there is clear evidence that women are the most active in organising events and
activities for the Italian Mass and the Italian Club. Gendered kin and quasi-kin networks overlap and show that despite
being controlled in the family economy, women in the ‘back kitchen’ (in fish and chips outlets and other family catering
businesses) create networks where social and cultural capital is transferred. In this sense, women become ‘social
capitalists’ (Zontini 2004, 9), who find satisfaction and power through their family networks, while also finding their
responsibilities and family conflicts increased.
Narratives are often the currency of transferring social capital in women’s networks. Women continuously tell
stories, and while telling stories they also create, activate and disconnect ties and nodes of their networks. The women
of the older waves of migration often tell their own stories,
… without men. Oh, our husbands wouldn’t have come. They wouldn’t, we’d talk, I don’t know, about baby, children, and
food, cooking, they didn’t want to hear all that (interview with Maria, 2003).
This network of stories forms a substratum of women’s sociability, consolidating not only gendered messages but
also gendered ties. These ties are often formed on the basis of kin or quasi-kin affiliations, but they are by no means
rigid, and can be switched on and off or left dormant. Thus Concetta tells the story of her aunt who, having left her
hometown in Italy, encouraged Concetta to move to Dublin. This demonstrates the fluidity of networks: in this case the
aunt-niece link is turned on to support a migration project, bypassing the powerful mother-daughter link (interview with
Concetta, 2004). In a similar way the women of Giovanna’s family are engaged in daily, personal and reflexive
communication practices with their kin, whereas the men seem to be involved in more practical, urgent and less
personally engaging forms of communication (De Tona, forthcoming). Carmela, a 33 year-old second generation
migrant, tells of a world of a gendered transnational exchange of kin work and kin care:
I remember my mum talking on the phone to my auntie Giuseppina, but not to her mum, my granny, who died when I was
14. But then nonna Maria, she couldn’t really speak towards the end of her life, she couldn’t really talk, so I don’t think my
mum would have talked to her on the phone, but she would have spoken to my auntie, and my auntie would have told my
mum how my grandmother was (interview with Carmela, 2003)
African women’s network of networks
While what seems to unify older migrants is a common origin as in the Italian case, AkiDwA is a network of
African women originating from different African national contexts, whose networking activity constructs a common
‘African’ origin. Quinlan (2002) argues that although AkiDwA mobilises difference in a strategically essentialist way
in response to macro concerns, on a local level the network’s activities challenge myths of both Irish and African
homogeneity, and shows how AkiDwA builds alliances with diverse groups of women to mobilise on particular issues.
Gender and race form the raison d’être for coming together: AkiDwA’s mission statement emphasises that it does not
want to be spoken for by either white women or African men.
Holton views networks as assemblages of people and social practices oriented to ‘problems’, but does not fully
develop his call to privilege ‘self interest or some other social orientation as leading to the development of networks’
(Holton 2005a: 212-4). According to AkiDwA executive member Alwiye Xuseyn, the networking emanates from
individual executive members’ experiences of isolation as part of the migration process, and their wish to help newer
African women migrants:
Isolation was the main reason, but at the same time, we found ourselves fortunate, of having the language … [and] we wanted
to be their interpreter, or the mediator between them and the Irish. That’s how the network started. And most of the members
of the networking, at that time, had free time. When I started with the networking… I said, yeah, I could use some of my free
time to help other women…
As in the case of the Italian women’s care networks, African women’s networking activities are often based on
‘older’ gendered practices of face-to-face interaction, creating bottom-up ‘webs of dialogue’ aimed at alleviating the
pain of migration. Xuseyn stresses the importance of face-to-face networking when she speaks about the training
offered by AkiDwA:
We will be there in the training, so it’s the face of AkiDwA at the time, so it’s not like you come and talk to our
representative now, it’s exactly an AkiDwA person who you would be meeting and talking to…
Such face-to-face networking is not very different from ‘older’ forms of women networking through narratives and
practices of mutual assistance, evident in the networking activities of Jewish women organising in Zionist-oriented
and/or community oriented network activities in Ireland (Landy 2005), or of Italian migrant women in Ireland,
discussed above.
However, the case of AkiDwA demonstrates that migrant women’s networks are often initiated by one individual.
6
Salome Mgubua came to Ireland with her Irish husband. In 1999 she met several women from different African
countries. Her impetus to network was her own sense of isolation, but although she was meeting regularly with a group
of African women from different countries, it was not until 2001, when Mgubua was able to enlist the support of the
Sisters of Mercy who gave the network office and meeting space, that the network got going:
… in the first meeting we shared our experience. And we realised that racism was a big issue in this country as well as
discrimination. And we said we have to do something, we have to speak out… after that we said, what about the other
women, if we are experiencing (racism and violence), what about other women…but at that stage we said we’d restrict the
group to only African women, because we knew Africa is a big continent, and if we open it to all women it may not work..
In 2005 Mgubua received personal funding from the One Foundation Social Entrepreneur Scheme which is paying
her a salary for two years, enabling her to devote all her time to AkiDwA. At the end of her two years, she hopes to
bring the issue of migrant women – hitherto relatively invisible – to the attention of the Irish public so that they are
listened to, consulted on, and included in all public policies. A needs analysis conducted by AkiDwA revealed African
women experiencing isolation and racism as asylum seekers in direct provision hostels, or as pregnant women around
the time of the 2004 Citizenship Referendum (R. Lentin 2004). Mgubua and AkiDwA executive members decided that,
because not all of the (women) were able to speak out, we would actually speak, we will be a network that will
speak on behalf of African women. And we’ll try and bring the issues that are happening in everything we do.
Having identified the issues confronting African women in Ireland, including isolation, domestic violence, and
Female Genital Mutiliation (FGM), AkiDwA aimed to help women form themselves into small groups around the
country, to establish a network of African women’s networks, which often break into ethnicity-based smaller groups,
such as Nigerian or Yoruba groups. The aim, according to Mgubua, is not to go into each group, but rather strengthen
the formation of these local groups of women coming together despite their differences of ethnic groups,
… to go into the network of networks, so that if they choose to do that they can do that outside AkiDwA, but still for them to
meet altogether to share their experience and work out their problems and how they can be worked out, as women.
AkiDwA’s work includes meeting with local African women’s groups, offering training, and creating space for
women to talk of their issues. By constructing a narrative space, the network acts as both a conduit and a representative.
Despite being under-funded, AkiDwA has gained visibility as part of Ireland’s intercultural industry, thanks mostly to
Salome Mgubua’s acting as public spokesperson for the network and for African, and migrant women in general.
Apart from constructing a network of networks, AkiDwA executive members also talk of their multiple
memberships in overlapping networks, both formal and informal:
…the networking started to be like putting up roots… there would be kind of two directions of the networking. One
networking through AkiDwA and you would do one networking through your own family, who would have maybe come also
from near your country, as asylum seekers, and you would keep in touch with them, and you build friendship. Like the
Muslim community… And you meet them if there is a wedding, or a birthday… Some times they would intersect… the paths
of these people crosses, from the AkiDwA women to your friends, or community, kind of where you come from (interview
with Alwiye Xuseyn, 2005).
A similar account of overlapping networking processes is also reported by Sancha Magat, a Filipina development
worker with the Migrants Rights Centre Ireland:
… the women’s issues in the community link … let’s say mostly women have different issues as well… it makes me aware
of what is going on with them … And then I have links with the Muslim group in the mosque, and there are also women
migrants there, who are unable to assert their rights. So it links, and I can explain to them that this is Ireland… and make the
Irish aware as well (interview with Sancha Magat, 2005).
More formally, apart from working with local networks of African women, AkiDwA executive members also
participate in various Irish organisations: some issue-based, such as Women’s Aid; others concerned with general
migration issues, such as the Immigrant Council of Ireland, which often refers African women to relevant NGOs for
advice and assistance. Salome Mgubua herself is involved with several Irish organisations, including Women in Crisis,
dealing with violence against women, and the Offaly Child Care Committee on Equality and Diversity; she has been
selected by the Minister for Health to sit on the Crisis Pregnancy Consultative Committee and is involved with National
Curriculum Development. Before moving to its Dublin city centre office, AkiDwA had an office in Cairde, an
organisation dealing with challenging ethnic minorities’ health inequalities, and was also working with Banulacht –
Women in Ireland for Development. Mgubua is also a member of the judging panel for the Metro Eireann Multicultural
Awards and was a founding member of the Coalition against Deportation of Irish Children (CADIC) which has worked
to reverse deportation orders against 18,000 migrant parents of Irish citizen children (Lentin and McVeigh 2006, 52-7).
Internationally, she has been involved with Grassroots Women Operating Together in Sisterhood (GROWTS) – a global
women’s movement working on environment issues affecting women. In addition, AkiDwA has established links with
7
BAWSO – Black Association of Women Step Out, a Cardiff-based voluntary organisation, providing specialist service
to Black and minority ethnic women and children fleeing domestic violence or made homeless through a threat of
domestic violence (www.bawso.org.uk), and Southall Black Sisters, a London-based not-for-profit organisation,
established in 1979 to meet the needs of black (Asian and African-Caribbean) women
(www.southallblacksisters.org.uk). These international links with similar groups working with black and migrant
women on issues such as domestic violence extend AkiDwA’s transnational networking activities well beyond the Irish
context and further its overlapping networking potential.
Conclusion: Narrating women’s migrants networks in ‘intercultural Ireland’
Our research has enabled us to theorise networking processes beyond and across the home country / new country
trajectory, as new trans-national spaces of cross-national boundary alliances, some based on occupational status (such as
the network of women domestic workers not covered in detail in this chapter), others based on a joint imagined origin
(such as the Italian women’s informal networks and AkiDwA).
It is important to note that the networking activities of women migrants in Ireland owe to 21st century Ireland’s
increasing globalisation, where new forms of migration – labour, asylum, and other – are shaping the re-racialisation of
Irishness in new ways. We also have a ‘racial state’ (Goldberg 2002) determined to declare its ‘intercultural’ intentions
while at the same time limiting immigration (Lentin and McVeigh 2006). However, the Irish interculturalism industry
has spawned new spaces for migrant-led organisations and networks, which, although often seriously under-funded and
under-represented, begin to take part in new conversations on discrimination, needs, rights and entitlements. Thus,
while old informal networking processes, like those engaged in by more established groups of migrants such as Italian
and Jewish migrants, have not become part of the intercultural conversation, new, perforce more formal networking
processes, by networks of domestic women migrants, or African women migrants, are supported by the ‘intercultural
industry’ through state, church and NGOs, bringing them into the intercultural conversation about, inter alia, citizenship
status and labour entitlements, but also about arguably more ‘female’ concerns such as violence against women, FGM,
sexual discrimination, and family reunification.
Our data indicate that these more formal networks are struggling to integrate members into Ireland’s ever-changing
ethno-racial and migratory reality. Through their involvement with the actual networking process, but also through
becoming increasingly integrated into coalitions, alliances and organisations in Ireland and beyond, these networks are
being co-opted into ‘intercultural Ireland’. Key actors, such as Salome Mgubua for AkidWa, emerge as centralising
nodes of migrant women’s networks. The networks, however, remain multi-centred in their functioning rather as
networks of networks. In the case of the less formal networks of old waves of Italian migration, women’s kin networks
are revealing how women are the social and cultural capitalists of their families and by extensions of their communities.
This is a gendered role, often produced and consumed ‘in the back kitchen’ – a metaphoric space of counter-hegemonic
realities.
Finally, the fact that the narratives of network members speak of their belonging to a series of multi-centred
overlapping networks, in Ireland, in their home countries, and internationally, contributes to theorising these gendered
networks as global in new and exciting ways.
Notes
Despite Castle and Miller’s (2003) claim regarding the feminisation of contemporary migration, feminist migration scholars (e.g.,
Anthias and Lazaridis 2000; Kofman et al 2000; Phizacklea 2001, 2003) argue that this feminisation is not entirely new (e.g.
Phizacklea 2003; Walter 2004).
2 See for example Panagakos 2001, 309, in relation to Greek diasporic women not fully embodying Greek ideals of womanly virtue,;
or Kanwal Mand 2001, in relation to analyses of Sikh marriages in India and Tanzania; and Akpinar 2003, on the positioning of
Turkish migrant women as carrying the collective’s honour and shame.
1
3
Such as the Filipina Women's Council started in the 1990s in Italy (Basa 2006).
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