Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Kris Hyesoo Lee, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

The burgeoning literature on migration and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) provides rich empirical evidence of how digital technologies, especially social media and networking platforms, are becoming integral to cross-border migration, increasingly blurring the boundaries between physical and virtual worlds. The emerging social-digital connectivity has transformed migration aspirations, mobility experiences, and migrants’ desires for citizenship and belonging across contexts. Drawing from a qualitative study conducted between 2019-2023 on the Vietnam-Australia migration corridor, I discuss how virtual communities and digitally mediated migration infrastructure shape migrants’ aspirations, practices, and the ways they navigate the restrictive, but also defective, neoliberal migration regimes in the Global North. Social media facilitate brokers’ access to a wide range of potential clients, but also challenge their previously dominant position in migration mediation negotiations. A focus on migration mediation at the intersection of social-digital spheres generates vital insights into the continually evolving relationships between the state, the market and the migrant subject in the Digital Age.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Lan Anh Hoang is Professor in Development Studies, School of Social and Political Sciences, the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Vietnamese Migrants in Russia: Mobility in Times of Uncertainty (Amsterdam University Press 2020), which won The Association of Mainland Southeast Asia Scholars Book Prize in 2022, and co-editor of Transnational Labour Migration, Remittances, and the Changing Family in Asia (2015) and Money and Moralities in Contemporary Asia (2019). Lan’s research on migration and gender has also been published in many international journals such as Gender and Society, Gender, Place and Culture, Global Networks, Population, Space and Place, Geoforum, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Mobilities, Asian Studies Review, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. She is the regional editor (Mainland Southeast Asia) of Asian Studies Review, thematic editor (Migration) of Development in Practice, and associate editor of Springer’s Global Vietnam book series.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this hybrid talk has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to ziqi@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.