The “Bare Life” of Thai Migrant Workmen in Singapore

The “Bare Life” of Thai Migrant Workmen in Singapore PDF Author: Pattana Kitiarsa
Publisher: Silkworm Books
ISBN: 1631020234
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Transnational labor migration often begins with the dream of securing a more stable and prosperous future, a chance to survive. The lure of “global cities” as a place to attain that dream looms large within the context of rural-urban migration flows. This book reveals some of the complex phenomena and processes that strip bare the lives and dreams of migrant workers living abroad, whose life experiences are overwhelmingly dominated by stress and suffering and diminished gendered roles. The book illuminates the intimate aspects of how Thai male migrants have transcended their harsh reality while living under Singapore’s strict regulations governing foreign workers. Stripped bare of the powerful sociocultural, economic, and legal processes that govern their existence at home, these men must recraft their gendered selfhoods, identities, and sensibilities. Using personal and interpretive ethnography, the book explores how popular music, sports, religious beliefs, cultural traditions, sexual desire, and intimacy are refashioned by appropriating cultural and symbolic capital into new cultural experiences. It also provides an extensive look at the sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome (SUNDS) among young healthy Thai construction workers in Singapore. The author’s in-depth analyses of migrant social life and male migrant gendered identitynegotiating processes provide an invaluable contribution to our understanding of labor transnationalism in the Southeast Asian context. Highlights An important contribution to studies of the masculinization of migration Provides ample insight into the lived experience of migrant workers Explores an often forgotten side of labor migration, that of sexual intimacy Adds a rich, detailed understanding of “village transnationalism”

The “Bare Life” of Thai Migrant Workmen in Singapore

The “Bare Life” of Thai Migrant Workmen in Singapore PDF Author: Pattana Kitiarsa
Publisher: Silkworm Books
ISBN: 1631020234
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
Transnational labor migration often begins with the dream of securing a more stable and prosperous future, a chance to survive. The lure of “global cities” as a place to attain that dream looms large within the context of rural-urban migration flows. This book reveals some of the complex phenomena and processes that strip bare the lives and dreams of migrant workers living abroad, whose life experiences are overwhelmingly dominated by stress and suffering and diminished gendered roles. The book illuminates the intimate aspects of how Thai male migrants have transcended their harsh reality while living under Singapore’s strict regulations governing foreign workers. Stripped bare of the powerful sociocultural, economic, and legal processes that govern their existence at home, these men must recraft their gendered selfhoods, identities, and sensibilities. Using personal and interpretive ethnography, the book explores how popular music, sports, religious beliefs, cultural traditions, sexual desire, and intimacy are refashioned by appropriating cultural and symbolic capital into new cultural experiences. It also provides an extensive look at the sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome (SUNDS) among young healthy Thai construction workers in Singapore. The author’s in-depth analyses of migrant social life and male migrant gendered identitynegotiating processes provide an invaluable contribution to our understanding of labor transnationalism in the Southeast Asian context. Highlights An important contribution to studies of the masculinization of migration Provides ample insight into the lived experience of migrant workers Explores an often forgotten side of labor migration, that of sexual intimacy Adds a rich, detailed understanding of “village transnationalism”

Challenging Southeast Asian Development

Challenging Southeast Asian Development PDF Author: Jonathan Rigg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317414586
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Over the course of the last half century, the growth economies of Southeast Asia – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – have transformed themselves into middle income countries. This book looks at how the very success of these economies has bred new challenges, novel problems, and fresh tensions, including the fact that particular individuals, sectors and regions have been marginalised by these processes. Contributing to discussions of policy implications, the book melds endogenous and exogenous approaches to thinking about development paths, re-frames Asia’s model(s) of growth and draws out the social, environmental, political and economic side-effects that have arisen from growth. An interesting analysis of the problems that come alongside development’s achievements, this book is an important contribution to Southeast Asian Studies, Development Studies and Environmental Studies.

More than Rural

More than Rural PDF Author: Jonathan Rigg
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824877748
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
In the 1970s, Thailand was developing but poor and largely agrarian. By the 1980s it had become the fastest growing large economy in the world and, in the process, made the transformation from a low-income to a middle-income economy. Fast forward to 2010 and Thailand had climbed yet another rung in the development ladder to become, according to World Bank criteria, an upper middle-income economy. Throughout this period of economic and social transformation, contrary to historical experience and theoretical models, one thing has remained constant: the central role of Thai smallholder farming. This conundrum—the persistence of the smallholder in a time of extraordinary change—lies at the heart of this book. In More than Rural author Jonathan Rigg explores how people in the countryside have adapted to their changing world, the new opportunities available, and the consequences for rural life and living. The Thai government has successfully “developed” the countryside, but with unexpected results. New household forms have emerged, women have become mobile in a manner few expected, and relations between rural and urban have changed. Yet the smallholder has persisted, and Rigg’s attempts to understand why offer a fresh perspective on Thailand’s development. Setting aside the urban, industrial point of view that we so often privilege, Rigg asks different questions about Thailand’s development. What if, he wonders, the present changes are not simply way stations, transitions to the main act of urbanization? What if they represent a new form of rural livelihood? Rigg’s thoughtful, nuanced approach to agrarian change—viewing the countryside as more than agriculture, the rural as more than the countryside, and rural people as more than farmers—offers insights into Thailand’s wider transformations (class identities, intergenerational relations), its political impasse, and more. Based on over three-and-a-half decades of fieldwork in seventeen villages, across three regions, and encompassing more than one thousand households, and a deep knowledge of primary and published sources, More than Rural is a significant work with implications for contemporary development across Asia and the global South.

Capitalist Colonial

Capitalist Colonial PDF Author: Matan Kaminer
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503641104
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
For decades, the agricultural settlements of Israel's arid Central Arabah prided themselves on their labor-Zionist commitment to abstaining from hiring outside labor. But beginning in the late 1980s, the region's agrarian economy was rapidly transformed by the removal of state protections, a shift to export-oriented monoculture, and an influx of disenfranchised, ill-paid migrants from northeast Thailand (Isaan). Capitalist Colonial, Matan Kaminer's ethnography of the region and its people, argues that the paid and unpaid labor of Thai migrants has been essential to resolving the clashing demands of the bottom line and Zionist ideology here as elsewhere in Israel's farm sector. Kaminer's account mobilizes capitalism and colonialism as a combined analytical frame to comprehend the forms of domination prevailing in the Arabah. Placing the findings of fieldwork as a farm laborer within the ecological, economic, and political histories of the Arabah and Isaan, Kaminer draws surprising connections between the violent takeover of peripheral regions, the imposition of agrarian commodity production, and the emergence of transnational labor flows. Insisting on the liberatory possibilities immanent in the "interaction ideologies" found among both migrant workers and settler employers, and raising the question of the place of migrants who are neither Jewish nor Arab in visions of decolonization, this book demonstrates anthropology's ongoing relevance to the struggle for local and global transformations.

Criminal Legalities and Minorities in the Global South

Criminal Legalities and Minorities in the Global South PDF Author: George B. Radics
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031179188
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
This book explores how the law and the institutions of the criminal justice system expose minorities to different types of violence, either directly, through discrimination and harassment, or indirectly, by creating the conditions that make them vulnerable to violence from other groups of society. It draws on empirical insights across a broad array of communities and locales including Afghanistan, Colombia, Pakistan, India, Malawi, Turkey, Brazil, Singapore, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. It examines the challenges of protecting those at the margins of power, especially those whom the law is often used to oppress. The chapters explore intersecting, marginal identities influenced by four factors: rebuilding after violent regimes, economic interest behind the violence, entrenched cultural biases, and criminalisation of diversity. It provides scholars from the Global North with important lessons when attempting to impose their own solutions onto nations with a different history and context, or when applying their own laws to migrants from the Global South nations explored in this book. It speaks to legal and social science scholars in the fields of law, sociology, criminology, and social work.

Covid-19 Pandemic And The Migrant Population In Southeast Asia: Vaccine, Diplomacy And Disparity

Covid-19 Pandemic And The Migrant Population In Southeast Asia: Vaccine, Diplomacy And Disparity PDF Author: Akm Ahsan Ullah
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9811253668
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted about 1 billion migrants (both international and domestic) in a variety of ways, and this book demonstrates how COVID-19 has widened the gaps between citizens, non-migrant and migrant populations in terms of income, job retention, freedom of movement, vaccine etc.While there is an emerging literature studying the impacts of COVID-19 on migration, the situation in Southeast Asia has not received much scholarly attention. This book fills the literature gap by studying the experiences of migrants and citizens in Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore and highlighting how the pandemic has exacerbated inequalities between and within the groups. These three countries are studied due to their high reliance of migrants in key economic sectors. Findings in this volume are derived from a qualitative approach, complemented by secondary data sources.This book is appropriate for undergraduate and postgraduate students of population studies, epidemiology, political science, public policy and administration, international relations, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and migration and refugee studies. Migration and labour scholars benefit from the nuanced comprehension about how a pandemic could cause a schism between migrants and the population at large. Policymakers may consider the proposed recommendations in the book to improve the migration situation.

Disastrous Times

Disastrous Times PDF Author: Eli Elinoff
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812252705
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Across contemporary Asia, each day dawns with a new story about living in an era of profound environmental change. Rapid transformations in the landscape, society, and technology produce new conflicts that are experienced at nearly every scale of life in the region. Environmental change is marked in square kilometers or micrometers, in cities or in households, within national boundaries and beyond. These changes appear in the form of radical ruptures wrought both by spectacular catastrophes like massive floods or tsunamis and by slow tragedies like the widening epidemic of asthma or the grinding processes of land dispossession. Each of these scales and phenomena reveals what it is to live in disastrous times. This book explores how people across Asia live through and make sense of the environmental ruptures that now shape the region and asks how we might analyze this moment of disruption and risk. Global environmental shifts such as climate change are usually linked to large-scale practices such as industrialization, urbanization, and global capitalism. Here, in contrast, contributors illustrate how understanding the practical, political, and ethical consequences of living in a moment of planetary change—or intervening in its course—requires engaging with the human-scale actions and specific policies that both shape and respond to such transformations at an everyday level. Coastal residents of routinely flooded Semarang, eco-conscious retirees in a Chinese suburb, and cyclists navigating air pollution in Kolkata each experience environmental risk and change in highly situated and specific ways; yet attending to their lived, quotidian experiences enables us to apprehend the complex processes that are profoundly changing the planet. Contributors: Nikolaj Blichfeldt, Vivian Choi, Eli Elinoff, Jenny Elaine Goldstein, Andrew Alan Johnson, Samuel Kay, Lukas Ley, Edmund Joo Vin Oh, Malini Sur, Tyson Vaughan.

Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations

Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations PDF Author: Gracia Liu-Farrer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317337247
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 563

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Book Description
Housing more than half of the global population, Asia is a region characterised by increasingly diverse forms of migration and mobility. Offering a wide-ranging overview of the field of Asian migrations, this new handbook therefore seeks to examine and evaluate the flows of movement within Asia, as well as into and out of the continent. Through in-depth analysis of both empirical and theoretical developments in the field, it includes key examples and trends such as British colonialism, Chinese diaspora, labour migration, the movement of women, and recent student migration. Organised into thematic parts, the topics cover: The historical context to migration in Asia Modern Asian migration pathways and characteristics The reconceptualising of migration through Asian experiences Contemporary challenges and controversies in Asian migration practice and policy Contributing to the retheorising of the subject area of international migration from non-western experience, the Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations will be useful to students and scholars of migration, Asian development and Asian Studies in general.

Irregular Migrants and the Sea at the Borders of Sabah, Malaysia

Irregular Migrants and the Sea at the Borders of Sabah, Malaysia PDF Author: Vilashini Somiah
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030904172
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
This book is an exploration of the relationship between irregular migrants, many originating from southern Philippines and the sea, in their struggle against the realities of state power in Sabah. As their numbers grow exponentially into the 21st century, the only solution currently provided by the Malaysian government is routine repatriation. Yet, despite increased border security, they continue to return. Thus the question: why do deported migrants return, time and again, despite the serious risk of being caught? This book explores the ways in which these irregular migrants contest inconvenient national sea boundaries, the trauma of detention and deportation, and other impositions of state power by drawing on supernatural support from the sea itself. The sea empowers them, and through individual narratives of the sea, we learn that the migrants’ encounter with the state and its legal system only intensifies rather than discourages their relationship with the Malaysian state.

Technical Territories

Technical Territories PDF Author: Luke Munn
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472903373
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Territory is shifting. No longer defined by the dotted line of the border or the national footprint of soil, today’s territories are enacted through data infrastructures. From subsea cables to server halls, these infrastructures underpin new forms of governance, shaping subjects and their everyday lives. Technical Territories moves from masked protestors in Hong Kong to asylum-seekers in Christmas Island and sand miners in Singapore, exploring how these territories are both political and visceral, altering the experience of their inhabitants. Infrastructures have now become geopolitical, strategic investments that advance national visions, extend influence, and trigger trade wars. Yet at the same time, these technologies also challenge sovereignty as a bounded container, enacting a more distributed and decoupled form of governance. Such “technical territories” construct new zones where subjects are assembled, rights are undermined, labor is coordinated, and capital is extracted. The stable line of the border is replaced by more fluid configurations of power. Luke Munn stages an interdisciplinary intervention over six chapters, drawing upon a wide range of literature from technical documents and activist accounts, and bringing insights from media studies, migration studies, political theory, and cultural and social studies to bear on these new sociotechnical conditions.