The webinar is part of a series focusing on issues concerning refugees in Malaysia by looking beyond the framing of refugees as beneficiaries but exploring the agency of refugees as active participants in advocating and mobilizing for their rights and livelihood. The seminar foresaw a conversation with Mahi Ramakrishnan and Saleh Sepas, co-directors of the 2020 Refugee Festival in Malaysia, discussing the role of the arts for advocacy and engagement. The seminar was moderated by Rusaslina Idrus, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

"Borders, Logistics, and Unequal Lives" in the time of COVID-19 is the first webinar to introduce the series of events we plan to initiate in the coming months. The September forum addresses the research lines we need to engage concerning the precarity of migrant lives in the pandemic and the border politics with logistics' operation behind the flow of capital in the 21st century.

The webinar showcased a conversation with two amazing youth leaders: Hasan Al-Akra, refugee rights activist and co-founder of the Al-Hasan Volunteer Network, and Abeera Abdulah, co-founder and vice-president, Project Standard Up.

On October 28th 2020, the CHCI – GLOBAL HUMANITIES INSTITUTE 2020-2021 continued its webinar series on the issue of “Migration, Logistic and Unequal Citizens in Contemporary Global Context.” The second webinar proceeded under the title of “Pandemic, Border Politics, and Xenophobia.” The webinar was initiated by Juan Alberto Ruiz Casado; he introduced the webinar’s program and its aims during his speech. The second webinar took place both offline, at the National Chiao Tung University, and online (via the ZOOM platform).

Migrant workers and the Covid pandemic, repatriation is part of an ongoing 2020-2021 series: “Migration, Logistics and Unequal Citizens in Contemporary Global Context.” The main objective of the webinar will be to join with workers, researchers, activists, policymakers, civil society organizations, journalists and GHI participants to highlight and address the urgency of ASEAN migrant worker justice in Asia under the Covid-19 crisis.

he webinar “Interventions from the South: Theoretical Perspectives and Pragmatic Issues of Migration, Logistics and Unequal Citizens in the Context of the Covid-19 Pandemic” is an integral part of multiple events organized by the CHCI-GLOBAL HUMANITIES INSTITUTE 2020-2021: Migration, Logistics and Unequal Citizens in Contemporary Global Context.

Rapidly increasing international migrations have radically changed the outlook of contemporary 21st-century societies, producing cases of massive displaced and precarious lives and bring various impacts upon local communities. After a year of knowledge sharing and exchanges, this GHI online summer institute invites early career researchers, advanced graduate students, and senior scholars from the interdisciplinary humanities and social science studies to share their researches on contemporary critical and urgent issues. Through the analysis of governmental policies, social inequity, community initiatives, documentaries, films, literature, archives, and cooperation with NGOs and artist groups, this intensive program offers analytical theorization foregrounds the subjective experiences and perspectives of migrants, proposes visions for the migrants’ human rights, as well as critiques the governments malfunctioning in dealing with these migrants.

In partnership with GHI: Migration, Logistics and Unequal Citizens in Contemporary Global Context, PARASTOO THEATER, a group of Refugees who want to fight the challenges, problems, and disturbances, was invited to present this piece of forum theater.

Taiwan’s offshore fishing industry ranks among the top in the world. There are more than 1,100 offshore fishing boats and 20,000 foreign fishermen employed overseas. However, these foreign fishermen, who have brought huge output to Taiwan’s fisheries, are facing the dangers of human trafficking and forced labor on fishing vessels, or are being terribly exploited in F.O.C. vessels. In the face of this major crisis of maritime labors, the two major themes—”Flag of Convenience, Labor Policies on Migrant Fishers and International Human Rights”, and “Labor Policies of Fishing Industries and Labor Rights of Fishers”—will be discussed in this workshop with a dialogue between Law and the Society to improve the labor and human rights protection for foreign fishermen.

Taiwan’s offshore fishing industry is rich in output value, and ranks among the top in the world. In pursuit of higher profits, ship owners often register their vessels in different countries. These “FOC” vessels have become the exceptional zone of law, and the foreign fishermen on the ships become vulnerable to human trafficking, forced labor and other crises. Therefore, the regulation of non-flag states vessels has become an important issue to resolve the human rights crisis at sea. Although FOC vessels do not fly the flag of Taiwan, after these ships enter the port, Taiwan, as a port state, still has legal measures to intervene. In the first workshop of the theme series ” Law, Human right and Transnational Labor Mobility”, Asst. Prof. Ming-Hao Yang will give an insight into Taiwan’s possible solutions to the human rights crisis on FOC vessels.

Temporary transnational migrants have dual identities – they are both workers and foreigners. As workers, their labor conditions should be equally protected as those of local workers; however, as foreigners, they are also affected by border and immigration control. One of the core of this control is to restrict the employment rights of foreigners in the name of protecting the domestic labor market, resulting in differential treatment. In this workshop “Law, Human Rights, and Transnational Labor Mobility”, Dr. Ya-Wen Yang will analyze the impact of Taiwan’s border control on the employment conditions of migrant workers and propose some solutions. Participants are welcome to join the discussion.

The project of decolonization in the 21st century is to identify and analyze the uneven power relation in contemporary societies that engineers and reproduces unequal social relations and environmental injustice. We invite interdisciplinary critical analysis and innovative artistic projects to engage with the task of decolonization in the 21st century: