THE CITY OF INVISIBLE WOMEN

In Kosovo, many women engage in care and domestic work. This highly feminized sector has never been regulated by the state, resulting in significant disparities within the labor market. Lacking legal recognition, care and domestic workers are often left dependent on the goodwill of their employers for fair treatment.

The oral history interviews presented here adopt a life-story approach, offering a glimpse into the lived experiences of care and domestic workers. While only covering a fraction of these realities, the interviews shed light on the dynamics of Kosovo’s unregulated economy. The narrators respond to a series of open-ended questions about their childhood memories, experiences before, during, and after the war, and their daily lives at home, school, and in the workplace.

The interviewees were between 22 and 65 years old. The original video recordings ranged from 60 to 180 minutes in length. In response to their requests for anonymity, we have converted the video interviews into audio recordings and edited them into short stories, each lasting between two and eight minutes.