This award to Dr. Sara L. Friedman (Indiana University) provides partial support for an international conference on labor migration within Asia. The conference will be held in June 2011 at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy. Over the past quarter-century, women and men have migrated across and within regions of Asia to engage in different forms of work and association, such as marriage and domestic labor, which bring workers from one country into close contact with families in other countries. The goal of this conference is to examine these apparently different types of labor migration as a single category, "intimate labor," and assess its cumulative effects on the understandings and practices associated with family, citizenship, labor, and gender in Asia today. Pushing beyond received categories for classifying and regulating migration flows, conference participants will use ethnographic case study data to highlight the migrants' own experiences and thus revise prevailing formulations of cross-border mobility and their impact on citizenship norms and national identities.
The conference will incorporate research from across East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Gulf states. It will include academic participants and representatives from policy-focused non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Findings from the workshop will inform new models for understanding Asian migration trends and policy directions. Through careful attention to contrasts between policy and lived experience, conference participants will consider how changing policy models affect labor performed in domestic relationships and spaces, as well as how they affects the migrant laborers' expectations of risk and opportunity. The conference will strengthen networks between academic and non-academic researchers, analysts, and policy makers. These ties will lead to future collaborative research projects, scholarly publications, and policy papers focused on inter-Asian responses to regional migration trends.
This award funded an international workshop held in June 2011 at the Rockefeller Foundation conference center in Bellagio, Italy. The participants employed a bottom-up approach to studying migration across Asia by focusing on conflicts between state policies and migrants' own lived experiences. By addressing different types of intimate migratory labor—marital, domestic, and sexual—the project contributed to recent calls to investigate the gendered, sexualized, and racialized dimensions of migration. Bringing together social scientists and NGO workers, the project assessed how state policies across the region influenced the migratory decisions and experiences of diverse groups of migrants. Moreover, it showed how those policies often produced irregular migration instead of blocking it. As a result, the project challenged the value of established categories used in migration policies and border policing efforts: voluntary vs. forced migration, legal vs. illegal status, and productive vs. reproductive labor. By pushing beyond received categories for classifying and regulating migration flows in inter-Asian contexts, the project has contributed new approaches to understanding cross-border mobility in Asia and the impact of migration on citizenship norms and national identities. The award has also produced a follow-up workshop at the University of Toronto (March 2012) and conference presentations at the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting (March 2012). The collaboration among workshop participants has yielded an edited volume currently under review with a major US university press.
