Emptiness, resistance, and repair: the shadow work of workplace readiness for new migrant women in Australia

In line with government priorities, universities increasingly promise to provide ‘workplace ready’ graduates, yet for many migrant women this readiness is produced through shadow work, understood as unpaid, invisible labour. Drawing on participatory action research with self-identified Culturally and Linguistically Marginalised Migrant and/or Refugee (CALMMR) communities in Australia, we analyse two contrasting lived experiences, Leni, a white German international student, and Adira, an Indian graduate and woman of colour, to theorise shadow work geographies across university, immigration and labour-market infrastructures. We show how emptiness (service deserts and academic acculturation burdens), resistance (workarounds to placement, visa and language requirements) and repair (reciprocal relations that convert hidden labour into collective capacity) together constitute slow infrastructural violence while also enabling transformation. We argue that ‘readiness’ is negotiated through embodied, relational labour that is unevenly distributed along intersecting lines of racialisation, migration status, gender and care responsibilities. We conclude with suggestions for concrete reforms.