• Date: June 22nd, Wednesday, 2022, 12:00 – 13:00
• Location: Samick Hall (Room 220), SNUAC (Bldg. 101)

Speaker: Jaok Kwon (Professor, Centre for East Asian Studies, Heidelberg University)

Research on migrants in studies of European welfare state regimes has converged into a discussion of whether migrants are ‘threats’ or ‘saviors’ to the existing welfare system. Especially in the case of Asian female migrants, it was common for them to be incorporated into the labor market as care laborers or domestic laborers; research on such Asian female laborers has discussed them in a limited range as either ‘saviors’ of the adult-laborer model or ‘victims’ of the global care regime. However, as the result of the EU’s recent active migration policy for highly skilled laborers such as the introduction of EU blue cards, the rate of highly skilled laborers’ migration from non-EU countries especially those in Asia is rising, along with a remarkably high increase of Korean women skilled laborers’ migration. This seminar will discuss Germany, a country that is actively encouraging the inflow migration of highly skilled laborers among EU countries, and take a gender studies perspective to examine how Korean highly skilled female migrant workers are either included in or excluded from the German welfare state regime with the focus on childcaring labor.