Cinzia D. Solari
Solari has been studying the former Soviet Union since the third grade when she read a biography of Catherine the Great. As a first generation college student of Italian immigrant parents, she studied Russian history at Brown University. Her book, conceived as a PhD student at UC Berkeley, on Ukrainian migration conducted in 3 languages (Russian, Italian, English) and in 3 countries (Ukraine, Italy, US) on domestic workers, the work most of the women in my family perform, was a calling.
Biography
Cinzia Solari is a sociologist of gender, migration, and globalization committed to the study of power, culture, and inequality. Her book, On the Shoulders of Grandmothers: Gender, Migration and Post-Soviet State-State Building, is forthcoming in 2017 with Routledge.On the Shoulders of Grandmothers uncovers a unique migration of middle-aged women, most grandmothers. Through interviews and ethnographic work with migrant grandmothers laboring as domestic workers in Italy and California as well as with their adult children in Ukraine, this book shows that post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-state-building is occurring transnationally. By comparing the experiences of individual migrants in two different migration patterns—one a post-Soviet “exile” of individual women to Italy and the other an “exodus” of families to the United States—she exposes the production of new gendered capitalist economics and nationalisms that precariously place Ukraine between Europe and Russia with implications for the global world order.
Her new project looks at the growing movement to organize migrant domestic workers in the United States at the local and national level while making connections to transnational labor organizing. She is particularly interested in the ways feminist theory is being deployed by organizers to help them solve problems of coalition building on the ground.
Education
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University of California, Berkeley, PhD, 2010
University of California, Berkeley, MA, 2003
Brown University, BA, 1997
Areas of Research / Professional Expertise
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Migration, Sex & Gender, Nation-State Building, Feminist Theory, Social Theory, Globalization, Political Economy, Domestic Work, Ukrainian Studies, Italian Studies, Qualitative Methods, Global Ethnography
Websites
Preview #1 Who cares about Ukraine? How can you not care about Ukraine! Cinzia Solari
Preview #2 Ukrainian mothers and grandmothers lead migrant workers
Preview #3 Ukrainian family is changing
Preview #4 Up to 3 million Ukrainian migrants in Italy
Preview #5 Ukrainian women in Italy would cry for hours; despair & disappointment
UMass Boston
Whole Interview with UkeTube