Zuzana Sekeráková Búriková

Zuzana Sekeráková Búriková is social anthropologist working as an associate senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology at Slovak Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include care, paid domestic workers, care ethics and home. She did research on migration of Slovak au pairs working in the UK, paid domestic workers in Slovakia, and care for foreign clients in Slovak senior homes. Her current research examines intersection of care, surveillance and technology.

Together with Daniel Miller she published the book Au pair (Polity 2010) on experience of Slovak au pairs and their host families in London. Her other publications on au pair identified au pairing as an economic strategy and rite de passage of young women and examine this migration in relation to neoliberalism and postsocialism. She has a vivid interest in materiality and home, so her other writing focuses on the role of home in negotiations of relationships between au pairs and their hosts and emphasizes the role of materiality and space in empowering and resistance of paid domestic workers.

Her second book Panie k deťom a na upratovanie / Doing Cleaning and Providing Childcare: Paid Domestic Work in Slovakia (in Slovak, Muni Press 2017) analyses paid domestic work in Slovakia. While previous studies examined Slovakia as the country sending domestic workers to more affluent countries, the book focuses on demand for paid domestic workers in Slovakia and examines how relationships between domestic workers and their employers are negotiated when domestic workers are local women. In the book as well as articles she argues that hiring of paid carers is related to availability of grandmothers and that paid childcare is structured after grandmotherly care.

Her current project focuses on the use of digital technologies in care relationships and examines intersection between care and surveillance.