Georgian Women on the Move

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.