Events

Immigrant and migrant parenting from and within Asia is a surprisingly understudied topic. This is despite intraregional migration (the median age of migrants in Asia is 35) being the dominant form of migration here. This workshop brings together scholars of Asian migration to consider what migrant parenting in Asia means for parents, families, and communities across old, new and/or multiple homes. We call for empirically grounded work which considers migrant parental care ranging from (but not limited to) classed, gendered and ethnicized parenting practices such as intensive parenting, remittance-sending and care-giving at a distance, food work, native language maintenance, culture work, and substitute care by relatives or fictive kin. By focusing on the emplaced, embodied, and gendered aspects of parenting, the workshop provides a finely grained lens to investigate intersectional agencies and subjectivities among migrant parents as well as the conjuncture between family and citizenship practices in superdiverse, multi-ethnic, Asian settings.

To address the overarching question of how migrant parenting is done in intra-Asia migration, workshop participants are invited to consider the following aspects of migrant parenting:

(1)        the different migration policies which hinder and/or facilitate migrant parenting to be accomplished in multidimensional, unexpected, and creative ways. For example, how migrant parenting may be achieved despite uncaring migration regimes particularly for labour migrants implicated in global care chains.

(2)        the kinds of migration (circular/circuit migration, stepwise migration) within Asia which engender variant forms of parental care enmeshed with ideological ‘Asian Values’ (e.g. stigmatized versus idealized parenting styles, the racialization of migrant parenting and hierarchies of destinations sites for parents)

(3)        advancing conceptualizations of affective citizenship practices conducted via the work of migrant parenting in Asia (e.g. emotions, generational transnationalisms, aspirations for ‘worlding’ children through migration, ICT use among migrant parents)

(4)     eliciting connections and comparisons on continental migrant parenting across Asia to wider theoretical applicability beyond Asian cases.

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

Dr Chand Somaiah
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Dr Exequiel Cabanda
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Assoc Prof Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho
Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

Prof Brenda S.A. Yeoh FBA
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

REGISTERATION HAS CLOSED

Zoom details has been shared with registered participants. If you would like to attend the workshop, please write to arios@nus.edu.sg