On 10 October 2024, our team had the pleasure to welcome Professor Vera Pavlou (University of Glasgow) in Strasbourg. We took the opportunity to change the format our monthly Journal Club to a “Meet the Author” session. Notably, we discussed Vera’s book, ‘Migrant domestic workers in the Europe: Law and the Construction of Vulnerability’ (Hart, 2021).

In her book, Vera explores the constitutive role of the law in structuring different aspects of migrant domestic workers’ vulnerability to exploitation. The book is the result of years of research on the subject, including her PhD thesis at the European University Intitute. This was a great opportunity for the researchers of the project to engage with her critical approach on the legal regulation, and to reflect on the intersection of labour and migration law. Vera was also open to discuss the more mundane aspects of book writing and PhD research, providing useful insights for our early career researchers.

During the Journal Club we also had the opportunity to have a discussion about the scope of E-BoP, and notably the choice of investigating intra- and extra-EU migraiton together (and even just talking about “migration” in the context of intra-EU movement of workers). This was inspired by several passages of Vera’s book, where she talks about “EU migration”.