Papers (Part 1)

• Migrant Workers’ Advocacy in Malaysia: Komunitas Serantau as an Informal Indonesian-Based Advocacy Community Pamungkas A. Dewanto Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

  After the 2008 General Election that was believed to be the beginning of the weakened electoral authoritarian regime in Malaysia, members of civil society have been more active in many different fields, in both local and national settings. Specifically, in the field of migrant workers advocacy, not only local NGOs and individual advocates that became more open in their engagement, but many new migrant workers’ networks and communities were also born in the last five years. Such a development is interesting as previously migrant workers were regarded as an object of exploitation and were seen as a helpless agency in navigating their survival in Malaysia. In this paper, I highlight the life of Nasrikah, through which I will discuss the role of an Indonesian community called Serantau that Nasrikah is chairing. Nasrikah has retained multiple identities as a domestic worker, a mother, as well as a migrant workers’ defender. In her hand, she managed to lead Komunitas Serantau to be a more civic community rather than just a space for a cultural gathering, as many other communities are. Despite that its appearance is more like a hometown association, Serantau is engaging in both grassroots social works and policy advocacy. In this research, I conducted an ethnographic work by following the activities of Nasrikah. I argue that despite the absence of formal outlets in migrant workers’ advocacy for foreigners in Malaysia, the case of Serantau has demonstrated that a less fluid and informal form of organization in which it engages both cultural and civic activities could also play a role in migrant workers advocacy. It becomes an interlocutor between migrant workers, policymakers, and NGOs that work across national boundaries. Serantau cultivates its organizational resources through a complex network of engagements with many other communities and NGOs.

• TBA Lennie Geerlings Leiden University
• Technology to Reposition Masculinities: Low-Wage Mainand Chinese Migrant Men in Singapore Sylvia Ang National University of Singapore

  While work on gender and migration has grown significantly, it has mostly addressed the experiences of female migrants; the experiences of male migrants are still understudied. Even less attention has been paid to male migrants and their heterosexuality. This paper is interested in Chinese masculinities, which in the migration literature have been discussed largely in relation to migration to the West. Discussions of low-wage Chinese masculinities have similarly been limited, with a focus on rural-urban migration within China. Empirically, this paper aims to contribute by investigating Chinese masculinities outside of China but in a non-Western setting. The arrival of low-wage migrants from China into Singapore’s majority-‘Chinese’ population not only enables an investigation of the hierarchies of Chinese masculinities but also unsettles the ‘Chinese’ ethnic category. I consider low wage mainland Chinese migrant men’s raced, gendered and classed subjectivities and show how low-wage mainland Chinese migrant men in Singapore employ technology to reposition their subordinate masculinities, with specific focus on their use of the suzhi discourse. This paper contributes through extending current analyses of masculinities to show how technology can enable both maintenance and transformation of masculinities.

• Visions of (Respect)ability: How Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong Negotiate Migrant Citizenship Samia Dinkelaker Osnabrück University

  The paper discusses how Indonesian migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong negotiate policy makers' visions of a more 'respectable' future of Indonesia as a 'labor brokerage' (Rodriguez 2010) country. Policy makers in Indonesia have repeatedly expressed their aspirations to ‘upgrade’ its migrant labor force, who predominantly work as domestic workers in households in countries of the Middle East and the Asia Pacific. As it has been argued, these aspirations are nourished by gendered and classed anxieties that circle around Indonesia’s identity as a sending country of menial workers who are classified as unskilled (Chan 2017). In the paper I will juxtapose official visions of Indonesia’s future as a labor brokerage state with insights into how Indonesian migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong enact distinct versions of 'migrant citizenship' (Rodriguez 2010). These versions incorporate the diversity of subjectivities formed in the course of their migration projects and are nourished by their particular experience as migrant domestic workers. The paper thus argues that negotiations of citizenship and national belonging and their articulations with gendered and class-based notions of respectability and valuations of their work not only matter to the societies of 'receiving countries', but also to those of sending states. Such a perspective fills a desideratum in global migration studies on the one hand (see e.g. Schwenken 2018) and contributes to the expanding discussion in the studies of South East Asia on current configurations of transnationalism in the region on the other (see e.g. Amrith 2017).

Papers (Part 2)

• Gambling and Ethical Practices: The Striving Towards Well-Being Among Burmese Migrants in Thailand Prasert Rangkla Thammasat University

  This presentation explores the ethical practices on well-being circulating around the gambling issue in an immigrant community. It is based on an ethnographic study among Burmese migrant workers in a commercial fishing town called Pranburi in Thailand. The case study represents fishing-related employment and low-paid labor community afflicted with financial debts and gambling problem. Being fond of betting on cards and illegal lottery receives responses that vary in according to different personal circumstances. Those gamblers destabilizing the family economic conditions are heavily condemned in public. Either borrowing for unreasonable spending or troublesome gambling are then denounced as self-indulgence. This work argues that these Burmese migrants’ stances on gambling are not just general moral critique, but rather an ethical guidance that they use to navigate across the future-making project. It is an emphasis that pleasure from high-risk games, as a value focusing on sensual gratification, is not compatible with the value on prudence and pride in ameliorating one’s life status and wellbeing.

• Post-Migration Strategy and Challenges of the Return Migrants in Northeast Thailand Soimart Rungmanee Thammasat University

  Migration has been described as one of the strategies that contribute to rural development. However, there is very little research questioning life after migration and the various challenges of reintegration in the home community. Drawing on an empirical case from a village in Northeast Thailand where migration to work aboard has been a key livelihood strategy, the paper focuses on first generation migrants who have returned and generally are emulated by their children, who have become the second generation migrants. It explores migration and return, and whether return migrants are able to successfully enhance entrepreneurial activities. It also questions whether the potential remittances offer new economic opportunities in agriculture and/or in non-agriculture activities. Some critical conjunctures (retirement, health problems, and changes in the situations of family, political and economic elements) that set the conditions for return migrants are considered to understand everyday risks and vulnerability facing return migrants.

• The Absent Presence of Migration in Narratives of Future Wellbeing Directed at and Among Young People in Remote Rural Laos Roy Huijsmans Erasmus University Rotterdam

  Migration and education are typically presented as diametrically opposed despite the many connections between the two (Hashim 2007). Education is presented as a key ingredient for realizing future wellbeing, while migration at a young age is portrayed as putting futures at risk. However, particularly in remote rural parts of Southeast Asia migration must be understood as a prerequisite for realizing normative imaginaries of wellbeing for the basic fact that completing secondary education in most remote rural villages requires migrating to district and or provincial centres or getting into boarding schools.

  In this presentation I draw on research conducted as part of an ESRC-DFID funded project. I present an analysis of imaginaries of wellbeing relating to future livelihoods proposed in Lao primary school textbooks and discuss the extent to which migration is part of these representations and/or children’s discussion about realizing these aspirations. I also analyse narratives of migration emerging from interviews with young people who have migrated for various kinds of education. On this basis I attempt to tease out the degree to which, and how precisely, migration is acknowledged in various narratives of realizing future wellbeing that are circulating in remote rural Laos.

• Transnational Marriage and Migration: Imaginaries and Narratives of Refiguring the Future and Wellbeing in Rural Thailand Patcharin Lapanun Khon Kaen University

  Transnational marriage and migration is a global phenomenon involving women in many parts of the world, especially Southeast Asia, and men, mostly from the wealthier locations in the global economic hierarchy. Scholars indicated that motives and desires encouraging women and men to engage in this marriage are diverse, complex and transcending materiality and intimacy (Constable 2005; Ishii 2016). The insight contradicts the normative way in which this marital relationship is illuminated in purely economic term, ignoring of socio-cultural and political dimensions. Such motivations/inspirations also reveal imaginaries of future livelihoods and wellbeing in the contexts of marriage migration, as a part of global migration stream.

  Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a rural northeastern Thai community, as part of the FAO funded project on migration, gender and land ownership in the Mekong region, this paper focusses on the perspectives regarding future and wellbeing of women engaging in transnational marriage and villagers relating to this marital relationship. Also, the paper presents narratives of how and in which contexts such perspectives/imaginaries are refigured and realized, and analyses the consequences of the on-going dynamics relating to transnational marriage and migration on women, and their families and community.

Abstract

Keywords

• Future
• Labor
• Migration