Project Description
As key pillars of pandemic response, hospitals revealed both the paramount importance of clinical care in treating patients, but also the crisis hospital institutions and their workers face in changing healthcare systems. Hospitals are central nodes of gendered global care chains where more-than-medical labour and diverse knowledge funds intersect in the everyday reproduction of healthcare. Ongoing precarisation of hospital work, an increasing reliance on migrant labour, and the outsourcing of services and maintenance work render healthcare provision fragile. This project offers a novel conceptualisation of hospitals as gendered, more-than medical spaces of entangled labour (care and maintenance work), mobilities (care work migration, diaspora, international recruitment), and knowledge (in/formal knowledge practices and embodied cultural knowledge). The project combines multi-sited with local hospital ethnography and the funds of knowledge approach, as well as participatory design research. Four subprojects will focus comparatively on hospitals in Switzerland and Austria, as well as the Post-Yugoslav region and Colombia.

Your tasks
The Postdoc researcher will be conducting their research within the Subproject C: Dis/entangling routes of labour: Tracing diasporic and recruitment pathways of hospital workers in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Jelena Tosic at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland (School for Humanities and Social Sciences / Migration Studies). Subproject C zooms in on diasporic and transnational contexts of lives and livelihoods of reproductive hospital workers. The project begins with an initial 4-month-fieldwork phase in Switzerland and Austria, where the Postdoc researcher joins the research teams of subprojects A (Switzerland) and B (Austria). The main multi-sited fieldwork phase (12 months) will employ multi-sited and mobile ethnography to trace diasporic transnational networks, practices, and recruitment pathways of hospital workers to and from their countries of origin – with a particular focus on the post-Yugoslav region (and including a short fieldwork stay in Colombia). This ethnographic focus includes family, friendship, and professional networks (e.g. educational institutions, former hospital workplaces) to reconstruct not only migration regimes and routes of recruitment but also to understand the educational and social resources, funds of knowledge, and culturally informed valuations of care and maintenance labour from diasporic (long-term histories of migration and connection) and transnational (recent labour migration) perspectives. Additionally, subproject C will also look at for-profit labour migration intermediaries (e.g. professional recruitment agencies, temporary staffing firms, and migration brokers) as key drivers of transnational mobility in the healthcare sector.
Subproject C will thereby explore how agencies and hospital workers, institutions and individuals are entangled in various ways (e.g. synergy, competion) as labour and workplace integration brokers. While the postdoctoral researcher will develop their own original research project within Subproject C, led by Prof. Dr. Jelena Tosic, it will be embedded in the pre-defined research framework of the larger collaborative WEAVE-SNSF project. This requires active collaboration with the team and contributions to the overarching research questions and objectives.