Mélinda Dinh

Navigating Invisible Walls: Imagination and Tactical Agency in the Professional Trajectories of Family-Reunified Women in Switzerland
2026

Switzerland faces a projected shortfall of 300,000 highly qualified workers by 2035, yet women who migrate through family reunification, often as skilled professionals, remain largely invisible in policy and research, treated as dependents rather than labour market actors. While structural barriers to migrant labour market integration are documented, the identity work through which these women negotiate professional selves remains under-theorised. Drawing on a critical realist epistemology, this study examines how these women engage in identity work and exercise tactical agency in response to structural constraints, asking how imagination mediates between the two.

To address this question, the study draws on semi-structured interviews with 16 women, based in French- and German-speaking Switzerland.

The findings show that credential non-recognition, institutional circularity, and gendered and racialised gatekeeping generate an epistemic rupture, or “sensebreaking”, between pre-migration expectations and post migration realities. In response, women deploy identity work strategies ranging from accommodation to outright refusal of devalued positions, while third-party spaces such as migrant associations function as critical infrastructure that restores reflexive capacity and imaginative horizons. Tactical agency, however, unevenly distributed, depending on intersecting positions of gender, class, age and racialisation that condition which women can keep imagining a viable professional future under prolonged uncertainty.

The study’s central contribution is to reposition imagination as a socially structured mediating link between structural constraint and tactical action. In doing so, it reframes family-reunified women as reflexive agents navigating a labour market that under-recognises them, with implications for credential recognition and integration policy.