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Lines of Research 

Conditions of Migration and Precarious Lives

Our GHI encourages researchers to study and analyze the reality of the forms of life of the international migrants, refugees, and stateless people in contemporary societies. We welcome analytic inquiries and theoretical engagements of cases of documentaries, films, literature, interviews, archives, governmental policies, NGOs/CBOs, and artist groups, in but not limited to Asia, on the following issues:

    • The experience and the emotions of migrant workers, refugees, or stateless people in their working and living environments in the receiving societies;
    • The role of social identities such as gender, sexuality, religion, nationality, legal status in conditioning migrant workers’ precarious lives;
    • How states manage labor migration import and repatriation/deportation as part of the development projects of the state, requiring explicit legal exclusion from residency and citizenship and migrant labor exploitation in the context of different countries, including the national evolution of legal framework concerning this issue;
    • The operations of the broker agency, the development of workforce agencies, regimes of brokerage that commodifies migrants into healthy bodies that are labor ready to be supplied abroad;
    • The support system offered by trade unions, local NGOs/CBOs, shelters, migrant centers, or resettlement plans at host societies; alliance-making among different groups (e.g. different migrant groups from different countries, women’s groups, labor unions, etc.) as well as the internal support system within the migrant communities;

    • How the increase in the numbers, relative visibility, and designation as an abject foreigner of migrant workers has led to new forms of Asian racism and xenophobia;

    • Ambiguities of migrant entrepreneurship: self-employment as a low-paid activity, forced self-employment (“quasi-self-employment”), and self-employment as an opportunity for professional advancement;

    • International student mobility/unpaid labor and its regulation through visa regimes, market mechanisms, university rankings, and labor statuses;

    • Transactional human trafficking of women and children for prostitution and forced marriage and labor.