‘Successful’ Women of the Transnational Field: Gender and Social Mobility among Sierra Leonean Women in Europe

The research project aims at analysing gendered strategies and performances of social mobility in contexts of migration, based on the practices of Sierra Leonean women who live in Europe and who are part of wider transnational networks. The main hypothesis is that gender impacts the type of strategies that women deploy in order to access social mobility in migratory contexts, as well as the way they insert and position themselves within transnational networks. Women move the social ladder by employing gender-specific strategies and resources situated in the transnational field. In doing so, they shape and sustain transnational networks, including diasporic networks, through strategies of individual and collective empowerment. Thus, the research opens a new window on the elaboration of strategies of female empowerment within migration and the maintenance of a higher social status, in multiple countries and social environments at a time. Achieving social mobility implies the performance of a new social status in multiple contexts, including the country of origin, the host country, and transnational and/or diasporic spaces. Those performances rely both on women’s adaptation to a new social and cultural context, and on the transposition of imaginaries of ‘success’ in different spaces.