Home › Academics › College of Liberal Arts › Faculty › Cinzia Solari

Faculty & Staff

Areas of Expertise

Gender and Migration, Work and Globalization, Social Theory, Global Ethnography

Degrees

PhD, University of California, Berkeley

Professional Publications & Contributions

• Solari, Cinzia. "Gendered Global Ethnography: Comparing Migration Patterns in Ukrainian Emigration." In Discourse and Politics of Immigration in the Global North, edited by Jorge Capetillo-Ponce, Glenn Jacobs and Philip Kretsedemas. New York: Routledge, forthcoming.

• Solari, Cinzia. "Between ‘Europe’ and ‘Africa’: Building the New Ukraine on the Shoulders of Migrant Women." In Mapping Difference: The Many Faces of Women in Ukraine, edited by Rubchak, Marian J. Berghahn Books, 2011, P. 23-40.

• Solari, Cinzia. 2010. "Resource Drain vs. Constitutive Circularity: Comparing the Gendered Effects of Post-Soviet Migration Patterns in Ukraine." Anthropology of East Europe Review 28: 215-238.

• Solari, Cinzia. 2006. "Transnational Politics and Settlement Practices: Post-Soviet Immigrant Churches in Rome." American Behavioral Scientist 49:1528-1553.

• Solari, Cinzia. 2006. "Professionals and Saints: How Immigrant Careworkers Negotiate Gendered Identities at Work." Gender & Society 20:301-331.

Additional Information

View Professor Solari's Curriculum Vitae

Current Research

My current research focuses on the intersections of gender, nation, and migration. I am working on a book manuscript titled Exile vs. Exodus: Nationalism and Gendered Migration from Ukraine to Italy and California. In the case of post-Soviet Ukraine, processes of gendered economic transformation have led to the marginalization of middle-aged women, mostly grandmothers. They migrate to Italy and California, the largest and most politically significant receiving sites for post-Soviet migrants, where they provide cleaning and caring labor to the elderly. This cross national comparative approach reveals that sending sites, rarely given analytical weight in the literature, have significant affects in the production of migrant subjectitives and practices in the receiving site. By following these migration streams back to Ukraine, I discovered that these two emigration patterns form the basis of Ukraine’s nation-building process in the context of an economic transition from socialism to capitalism. In addition to 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this study also relies on 158 interviews conducted in Russian with migrant careworkers in Rome and San Francisco and with family members left behind in Lviv, Ukraine.