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This qualitative study seeks to explore the grounded realities of live-in care workers in Malta. The growing economic affluence in Malta, coupled by an ageing population and the lowest fertility rate in the European Union, is resulting in a greater demand for live-in care givers, particularly from the Philippines. Reinforced through public policy wherein families who employ a qualified live-in carer are benefiting from government subsidy to ease burden on the state’s residential homes, Malta appears to be moving from a passive to a more active international recruitment of domestic migrant workers. This inquiry provides an evidence-based contribution to the appeal of the European Economic and Social Committee of the EU calling for more research about the rights of live-in care workers in Europe which has long remained almost invisible to EU and Member State policymakers. The majority of the findings reflect some of the concerns that have already been identified in international literature, like higher levels of precariousness, contractual agreements not being honoured, psychological obligations, fraudulent agents and the lack of separation between work and personal life. Other findings have endogenous characteristics that are closely linked to the island state of Malta, namely its safe environment, Catholic culture, bilingual coexistence of Maltese and English and the competitive nature of Filipino community groups that may discourage further social engagement. The chapter concludes with brief policy suggestions to trigger improvements in the wellbeing and dignity of migrant carers.

Liza Piper and Lisa Szabo-Jones, eds. Sustaining the West: Cultural Responses to Canadian Environments. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015. $42.99 CAD. The field of environmental humanities study is, by necessity, an inter-, trans-, and multidisciplinary affair. Emergent scholarship in the area accepts as axiomatic the need to engage with scientific understanding of crises facing the biosphere, and it most often responds obliquely by drawing on a variety of humanities disciplines that focus on culture (including science cultures). But Liza Piper and Lisa Szabo-Jones, editors of the essay collection Sustaining the West: Cultural Responses to Canadian Environments, well understand that the humanities' response to environmental exigency must exceed efforts to build bridges between the arts and sciences--such work must operate beyond narrow forums of specialized expertise, in defiance of institutional blocks to interdisciplinary work and representative of the many cultural voices speaking out on environmental issues. Those three impulses clearly informed the generative event out of which this collection grew, a 2011 workshop held in Edmonton, Alberta and titled "Cross-Pollination: Seeding New Ground for Environmental Thought and Activism Across the Arts and Humanities." It is perhaps this meeting that led to the book's geographical focus on Western Canada, where the contributors work and live. Ethical knowledge and sustainable action, as the editors argue, best arise from critics being present, alert, and patient in order to discover "how cultural forces alternatively mask and reveal particular aspects of a place's history and nature, and to thus participate in a commitment to sustaining them well into the future" (Piper and Szabo-Jones 8). The list of contributors is impressive, indicating a wide range of Western-based writers engaging with diverse ecologies. And the editors succeed in their efforts to represent a spectrum of voices: university-based researchers (usually writing from intersections involving environmental history, ecocriticism, and indigenous studies) offer their perspectives along with visual artists, filmmakers, naturalists, poets, the head of an applied research company, a writing specialist, a digital humanities director, and eco-bloggers. The collection consists of three main sections. Part One, "Acting on Behalf of," involves histories of activism, analyses of interventions, and both research and contemplation as calls for action. The range is compelling: the writers discuss how prairies can recover through near-utopian idealism, Cree and Metis perspectives on place, a conservancy with four bioclimatic zones, the performance of restoration ecology, ecophilosophy and affect, and animals in relation to the sublime, visual art, consciousness, and perception. …

This chapter outlines the changing scenarios of the two small states under study. Malta and Ireland present interesting case studies on how Europeanization can be accommodated within existent territorial politics signaled by the distinctive features of smallness, islandness, and periphery. Primarily, the chapter has two major sections involving two parallel narratives elucidating the Maltese and Irish identities and the series of transformations they have gone through, particularly, over the last five decades. In particular, it tries to explore the narratives from the perspective of a contemporary state-society relationship. This is in line with the school of institutionalist thought, which, according to Schmidt (2006: 98), is characterized by its emphasis on the institutional terrain where political events occur and for the outcomes and effects they generate. The major aim is to lay out the political landscape where state and non-state actors are involved in the act of governance. Decoding the various elements that constitute the terrain through which political actions sprout and spread is the first step in understanding how and why interest groups in small island polities behave and act in specific ways. Furthermore, as Olsen (2002) maintains, the impact of the EU on territorial politics is classified as one of the many faces of Europeanization. The discussion in this chapter stimulates the presentation and analysis of primary data in the next three chapters generated through fieldwork in Valletta, Dublin and Brussels.

Following the presentation of results concerning trade unions and employers’ associations in the previous chapter, the next logical step is to deal with the remaining case studies. More specifically, this chapter will uncover any signs of continuity and change among Social, Human rights and Environmental Groups (SHEGs) in Malta and Ireland. Because of the small number of research subjects, the two sectoral groups, that is, social/human rights and environmental, have been compounded for statistical analysis while kept separate in terms of their qualitative narratives.

This chapter presents a number of features that exhibit the dual existence of continuity and change among trade unions and employers’ associations in Malta and Ireland through the unveiling of major qualitative and statistical findings. Together with representatives of social partners, there are also heads of state mediating organizations, chiefs of think tanks, and political observers who took part in the interviewing part, whereas only registered unions and employers’ associations participated in the questionnaire.

Recent frequently cited treatises by Goldstein, Freud, and Solnit have overemphasized family autonomy and disregarded the positive aspects of social interdependence. A privacy-seeking ideology can constrict the support and feedback functions of social networks. Rather than focusing on the "best" way to break up families when problems become severe, emphasis should be placed on preventive services at a mcuh earlier point. Public policy should be directed toward empowering the community as a family support system.