Associate Professor Paula Mählck’s recent book Domestic Work in Postcolonial Tanzania is a careful study of how household and care work is learned in contemporary affluent expatriate households. The book takes seriously the power dynamics associated with learning and unlearning gender roles, alongside learning and unlearning the expectations of an academic discipline.

Mählck examines how the relationships of domestic work have evolved from the colonial era to the present by examining contemporary narratives from privileged female expatriate employers and Tanzanian domestic workers, colonial documents, analysis of the built space of expatriate households, as well as literary works and analytic autoethnography. At its core, the book investigates how learning and unlearning take place within the context of domestic work. It challenges the simplistic victim/survivor dichotomy, emphasizing that coping and negotiating power dynamics is a complex, ongoing process. Mählck argues that unlearning oppressive practices—distinguished from formal affirmative actions—is key to creating meaningful change, both for individuals and in broader social contexts.

Significantly, this book rethinks what sociology can look like. Studies of African countries from the West are frequently marked by cultural biases, exoticization, exploitative research practices, the imposition of Eurocentric assumptions, and a failure to engage with African epistemologies. This book addresses such failures of Western research methods in non-Western contexts, presenting a reflexively critical analysis of dominant Western sociological methodologies. Mählck’s use of literary works and autoethnography as well as careful attention to her subjects’ own self-narratives as legitimate research expands the methodological possibilities for Western sociologists.

Paula Mählck is an Associate Professor of Sociology of Migration and Ethnicity at Stockholm University’s Department of Education.

Domestic Work in Postcolonial Tanzania is available open access thanks to Stockholm University. You can read this book online or download it for free here.