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PRECNIGHTS


A project that studies how women migrant nightworkers (WMN) become unseen in the masculine world of nightwork.

PRECNIGHTS also looks at what WMN need to do, how they perform at night to be accepted and treated equally to men working at night.

It aims to improve their lived and felt experiences by uncovering ways in which they create spaces of resistance, support and safety.


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PRECNIGHTS: At a glance

PRECNIGHTS stands for Precarity Amongst Women Migrant Nightworkers in Ireland. Dr Julius-Cezar MacQuarie conducts PRECNIGHTS under Dr Caitríona Ní Laoire’s mentorship, both based at the Institute for the Social Science in the 21st Century.

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Milestones achieved

Dublin & Cork Nightscoping § Focus groups § Interviews § Events at UCC § Writing RTÉ Brainstorm article § Advisory Board set up § Launch of comic strips series § 2024 Researcher's Nightworkshops: PeopleFestival, IMISCOE, EASA.

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Meet project Advisory Board

Members of the Advisory Board offer their expertise, time and guidance on: Reaching out to vulnerable groups in Dublin & Cork § Raising awareness of the need to and working towards improving WMN rights to decent work.

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What we do

PRECNIGHTS is the acronym for Precarity Amongst Women Migrant Nightworkers in Ireland. PRECNIGHTS is a pioneering project in the field of research on the hidden experiences of Women Migrant Nightworkers (WMN).

Thematically, PRECNIGHTS adopts intersectional lens to look at several dimensions of these WMN's experiences, such as:

  • Identity: Who do they need to identify with and what identifies them?
  • Language: Do they use mostly the mother tongue or the language from their country of origin? or the language in the country where they work and live in? Perhaps the language of their partners (if/when other ethnicity or nationality)? Or perhaps they use a language that they feel more attuned culturally to?
  • Ethnicity: Which groups do they associate with? Diaspora groups or people still living in their home country? Or is it by association with their workplace at night?
  • Gender: How or do they perform masculinised behaviours and norms in order to be accepted, treated equally to males? And in what kind of encoutners are these revealed? 

Methodology:

Nightnography is the main method used in this research. Nightnography is a portmanteu for night and ethnography*.

It consists of mixed methods to capture bodily and cyber-ethnographic representations and visual-analytical tools to capture the hidden experiences of WMN, which combines the following instruments:

  • i) night walking (with or without interviewing);
  • ii) bodily notetaking (Stratham 1996; Wacquant 2015);
  • iii) informal and genuine conversations with participants (Jansen and Driessen 2013);
  • iv) interviews and focus groups, which are
  • v) audio-video (A-V) recorded. 

PRECNIGHTS communicates results to the end-users via graphic illustrations, short-film projections to reach out to mixed audiences. The purpose is to meet the open-science objectives designed to engage in public debates from bottom-up.

PRECNIGHTS produces short analysis pieces for platforms like RTÉ Brainstorm and The Conversation, and academic publications, reports and policy documents for specialised as well as mixed audiences.

*Ethnography is in-person observation, and the preferred method in anthropology. The researcher is at times an observer and at others a participant.

Profile: Joana

Joana's story in case speaks volumes for women who are de-skilled in manual jobs

"A third of staff on the night shift in this fast food in Dublin are women."

Joana, South America, 37 | Working on night shifts for 10 months.

"It’s hard work, but you have to do all the same jobs as the men. Getting to the hot plate for the burgers is hard. I’m short and I can’t reach the grill so easily. … At the end of the shift you need to carry out the heavy bin bags. For women is much harder.

Spotlight: Advocating for decent working conditions for night workers

Why night workers do not have the same decent working rights as daytime, 9-5ers?

The world of work is in urgent need of repair. There is a pressing demand for a new set of arrangements that address the specific problems with nightwork, e.g., invisibility, isolation, and tremendous negative impacts on health. That is why I think you should take interest and help in the setup of this open, democratic process to improve the lives of nightworkers. In support of nightworkers we encourage all readers (e.g. stakeholders, critical thinkers) to support by signing the Charter and share it with others to do the same.

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PRECNIGHTS is a project funded under Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) | Grant №: 101063938 | Host: Institute

for Social Science in the 21st Century

Top Floor floor, Carrigbawn / Safari Building | Donovan Road | Cork, Ireland , T12 YE30

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