Female Labor Migration in Globalizing Asia: Translocal/ Transnational Identities and Agencies

Over the past decades, the globalizing economies of Asia have undergone dramatic growth. This has been accompanied by a rise in labor migration within the region—across local and national borders---that is increasingly commercialized, irregular, and feminized. Understanding these trends is important for policy making in the region and for furthering critical theory on gender and globalization. This workshop aims to explore the mutual interactions of global and local discourses and practices that shape female migration and labor in and across Asia, particularly in Southeast Asia and China, as well as Asian migrant women workers’ experiences, identities and agencies.

Detailed ethnographic case studies have documented the myriad ways that gender, as it intersects with other forms of inequality, conditions women’s incorporation into global capitalism. Gender roles and ideologies structure migration decisions and expectations, labor recruitment and production processes, and the global stratification and commodification of care, for example. Yet women migrants are also agents in globalization. Placing them as subjects at the center of inquiry is integral to challenging normative paradigms that implicitly posit globalization as agentive and masculine and local processes as reactive, passive, and feminine.

This workshop presents an opportunity to link up contemporary research within and across the region in order to foster innovative theoretical connections. The organizers seek insightful perspectives grounded in original empirical research that can effectively capture the dynamism of these gendered processes unfolding on the ground and in the lives of social actors they involve. Contributions from anthropology, gender studies, human and cultural geography, political economy, and sociology are especially welcome. Selected workshop papers will considered for publication in a special journal issue(s).

Possible topics for consideration include:

 Migrant women’s labor in global factories and global cities
 Subjective understandings and experiences of migration and work
 Translocal/transnational identities and emplacement practices
 Spatial and social mobility (and social capital) of women migrants
 Resistance/accommodation to global capitalism and gender ideologies & roles
 Translocal/transnational spaces, technology, and communities of resistance
 Rethinking globalization theory through a focus on women’s agency

For further information, please contact:
Dr Arianne Gaetano: [email protected]
+65-6516-7788 (Tel.) or +65-6779-1428 (Fax)
Ms Shamala Sundaray: [email protected]
+65-6516-7170 (Tel.) or +65-6779-1428 (Fax)

http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/events_categorydetails.asp?categoryid=6&eventi...