“This book is a compelling, multilayered exploration of the labor migration experiences of Georgian women in Greece. The author situates migration experiences within the broader socio-political upheavals of post-Soviet Georgia, illustrating the interplay between historical and structural circumstances and individual life trajectories.” • Maia Barkaia, Georgian Institute of Public Affairs
“This is an insightful, sympathetic and well-written account of the life-worlds of Georgian migrant women in Greece, one that could not have been given had it not been for the ethnographic depth of the material. It is clearly written by an author who knows her craft, the history of the places she depicts, and the theoretical concepts she applies.” • Martin Demant Frederiksen, Aarhus University
The lives of Georgian women who began migrating to Greece in the early 1990s have largely remained invisible. Georgian Women on the Move offers an intimate account of these Soviet-educated care-workers in Thessaloniki during 2015, amid Greece’s economic crisis. Through their everyday practices of care and remittance-sending, migrant women have been central in repairing the social and economic ruptures of the 1990s and the subsequent years of instability in Georgia. Drawing on ethnography, the book traces the precarious lives of these women and how they cope with uncertainties arising from unregulated care work, insecure legal status, and the enduring obligations of transnational motherhood. All the while carrying the weight of separation, they remain deeply connected to a distant Georgian “home.” By exploring the entanglement of multiple life-worlds, the book reveals migration as an evolving economic and moral project, through which women actively forge a safer, more hopeful future for their children—and, ultimately, for themselves. Richly detailed, deeply human, and analytically rigorous, the book provides new insights into care, gendered labor, and agency in times of overlapping crises.
Weronika Zmiejewski is a social anthropologist specializing in the Caucasus and Central Asia. She earned her PhD from Friedrich Schiller University in Jena with a dissertation on Georgian migrant women in Greece, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Greece (Thessaloniki) in 2015 and Georgia in 2016. She is currently working on a postdoctoral project focused on World War II recordings from Central Asia at the Phonogrammarchive in Vienna.
LC: DF136.G46 Z65 2026
BISAC: SOC007000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Emigration & Immigration; SOC028000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Women's Studies; HIS042000 HISTORY/Europe/Greece (see also Ancient/Greece)
