Isolation, uncertainty and change: Indian immigrant women and the family in northern Italy

Abstract

Based on fieldwork with immigrants of Indian origin and with Italian doctors, social workers, teachers, and employers around Fidenza and Parma in northern Italy, this paper seeks to understand the social and cultural dilemmas of being an immigrant in Europe. The dilemma of isolation and uncertainty is most starkly understood by migrant women in their fraught experience of being marginalised and excluded in both the domestic sphere as well as in the social worlds they inhabit. This paper seeks to decipher the multiplicity of experience in bounded urban spaces as well as in rural farms in the region.