Lines of Research
Theoretical Issues Concerning the Questions of Unequal Citizens
The upsurge of migrant workers, refugees, and human trafficking have changed the composition of the social space and worsen the inequality among the people who live and work in the same social space but do not share equal access to the cities nor exercise political subjectivities where they spent their daily life. 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:
- How do new forms of exclusion through citizenship and residency rights facilitate the latest developments in today’s formation of uneven late capitalism?
- How do traditional colonialism and ongoing forms of new colonialism or internal colonialism shape citizenship regimes in diverse local contexts in Asia and beyond? How did the colonial histories, the process of the post-colonial independent nation through Citizenship Acts, and the current immigrant/migrant worker regulations co-figured the politics of inclusive exclusion and triggered the reality of unequal citizens in contemporary societies?
- How do we analyze the structural violence of the statist division between citizen and non-citizen, or differentiated citizens, that causes the violation of fundamental human rights against a particular population?
- How do we problematize the concept of the “illegal migrant workers”? How is the illegal social space of the precarious bodies produced legally by governmental sectors and other transnational agencies?
- How do we further understand the fear of the transient—the homeless, migrants, refugees? What is the nature of the local xenophobic reactions toward the migrant labor and refugees?
- How do theoretical and empirical investigations of citizenship influence understandings of migration in ways different to analytical approaches that stress other kinds of political subjectivity—e.g., social class, the lived experiences or agency of the refugees and stateless people?
- To what extent do patterns of migration in the Asian region disarticulate the figure of the citizen from the figure of the worker? What are new and emerging ways of theorizing citizenship and migration that are relevant in various contexts?
- In what ways can we theorize the ‘indentured’ as a poetics of relation, for example, through Mauritian poet Khal Torabully’s notion of the ‘coolitude,’ or Martinique philosopher Edouard Glissant’s concept of opacity, or alliance-building against what Laura Ann Stoler characterizes as the persisting imperial durabilities of our time?
- What forms of agency and belonging do migrant enact despite legal exclusions, including political participation, economic belonging, trade unionism and migrant/refugee organizing? What forms of differentiated citizenship, exclusion, and belonging shape contemporary migration experiences e.g., indenture, statelessness, residential registration, denizenship, plural citizenships, war and violence?
- What forms of agency and belonging do migrant enact despite legal exclusions, including political participation, economic belonging, trade unionism and migrant/refugee organizing? What forms of differentiated citizenship, exclusion, and belonging shape contemporary migration experiences e.g., indenture, statelessness, residential registration, denizenship, plural citizenships, war and violence?