The (sub)project zooms in on diasporic and transnational contexts of lives and livelihoods of reproductive hospital workers. It traces diasporic transnational networks, practices, and recruitment pathways (Switzerland, Austria, post-Yugoslav region, Colombia) of hospital workers through multi-sited and mobile ethnography. This ethnographic focus explores family, friendship, and professional networks (educational institutions, former hospital workplaces, etc.) to reconstruct not only migration regimes and routes of recruitment but also access the educational and social resources, funds of knowledge, culturally informed valuations of care and maintenance labour from a diasporic (long-term histories of migration and connection) and transnational perspective (more recent labour migration trajectories). The Subproject also looks at for-profit labour migration intermediaries, including professional recruitment agencies, temporary staffing firms, and migration brokers, as key drivers of accelerating transnational mobility in the healthcare sector. The Subproject explores how agencies and hospital workers, institutions and individuals are entangled (in synergy, competition, etc.) as labour and workplace integration brokers.
Team: Prof. Dr. Jelena Tošić (PI), Anita Prša (Researcher) Bernadette Richvalsky (Project Support)
The local hospital as a global workplace: An interview with Jelena Tošić
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 a 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 two contexts of European (Post-Yugoslav countries) and extra-European (Colombia) staff recruitment and workers’ trajectories and knowledges.
(Funding: Weave SNSF/FWF; Duration: 1.1.2026-31.12.2029; Project Consortium, Dr. Julia Rehsmann, Bern University of Applied Sciences/PI, Prof. Dr. Janina Kehr, University of Vienna Co-PI, Prof. Dr. Jelena Tosic, University of St.Gallen, Co-PI)