Description

In the international context of heightened state efforts to ‘secure’ borders and control migration, migrants and labor brokers continue to find creative ways to escape state surveillance, mobilize laws for their own goals, and maneuver around regulations. This workshop focuses on labor brokers, migrant domestic workers, sex workers, and marriage migrants from and to various parts of ‘Asia’ (East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Gulf States). As such, it is interested in the perceptions, experiences and negotiations of moving populations with the modern security state.

Speakers will examine the specific legal, regulatory, and disciplinary pressures that shape migrants’ work/lives in home and host countries, and trace the ways that migrants and brokers engage, inhabit and rework these pressures. The workshop pays particular attention to the definitions of intimate roles, domestic responsibilities, and sexual identities that migrants invoke and subvert in their interactions with national securitization campaigns, border policing practices, labor brokerage relationships, and the formal and informal regulation of transnational and national labor markets.

This event will be a pre-workshop in preparation for the international Association of Asian Studies Conference which will be held in Toronto in March 2012. Among the participants in the workshop are University of Toronto faculty affiliated with the Asian Institute, as well as scholars presenting papers at two panels at the AAS conference: “Movement, life course and temporalities: migrant lives across time and space” (organized by Mark Johnson and Nicole Constable) and “In/secure intimacies: Inter-Asian migrations in the shadow of the state” (organized by Rachel Silvey).