Gendered Experiences of Migration: Seeking Education and Employment in an Urbanizing World

Dear Colleagues,

The growth of urban populations across the world is being driven to a large extent by international and internal migrations, so that the experiences of new migrants become central to understanding the changing nature of contemporary cities. These experiences are likely to be shaped by gender in significant ways – for instance, in terms of who is able to become a migrant, as well as the social and economic roles available for new migrants in urban destinations. While gender and migration has often been studied in terms of marriage and family, there is also a need to link it to education and employment opportunities. From an economic perspective, skills associated with migrant populations have either placed them in positions of affluence or relegated them to informal and precarious work. Whether opportunities for education and employment differ by gender thus becomes important in understanding how gender intersects with class formations. From a social perspective, the expression of ethnic and national identities now encompasses both physical and virtual spaces. Gender differentiated participation in these various spaces is likely to be another important aspect of the reconstruction of ethnic identity in urban destinations. There is also a political aspect to socioeconomic experiences, as immigration policies may favor specific places and skills which in turn may gender migration flows. Overall, there is a need to extend existing approaches to gender and migration by (i) placing migrants at the heart of urbanization, (ii) viewing urban identity formations as cross-cultural encounters, and (iii) analyzing how intersections of gender and migration reveal both barriers to migration and collective struggles to overcome these barriers.

This Special Issue invites research that makes new contributions to understandings of gender and migration and welcomes qualitative and quantitative studies from across the Global South and North. It especially seeks articles that contrast the experiences of women and men, or connect migration experiences across origins and destinations.

Dr. Pratyusha Basu
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as conceptual papers are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Societies is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.