Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Brenda Yeoh, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

PROGRAMME

ABSTRACTS

This seminar draws on ongoing research conducted by Aajeevika Bureau and the CHAMPSEA project at ARI’s Asian Migration cluster. It looks at the topics of migration, health and later lifecourse across two broadly thematic questions: Firstly how does a focus on the gendered embodiments of migration and emotions contribute to better understandings on the sureties and collaterals of serial and circular migration on migrants and their families? Secondly, how does the idea of return cohere with the everyday realities of (prematurely ageing or ill) returning migrants and left-behind family members? The papers intend to explore these lines of inquiry through investigating well-being and temporalities within cultures of migration located in rural migrant-sending regions of subcontinental India and archipelagic Indonesia.

Aajeevika Bureau has undertaken a wide range of field based research into aspects of seasonal migration, labour and employment. Knowledge building adds to perspectives on this under-researched area and also helps the Bureau design new services and interventions for migrant groups. There are enormous gaps in policy for migrant workers at the state and national level and Aajeevika Bureau’s work makes important contributions in defining new agenda, priorities and programmes that can be adopted by government and industry for the vast number of migrant workers. As a pioneer practitioner in the area of internal migration, Aajeevika Bureau partners closely with field organisations and donors to help them expand their reach to vulnerable migrants.

The Child Health and Migrant Parents in Southeast Asia (CHAMPSEA) Wave 2 project continues to investigate the long-term impacts of parental migration on the health and well-being of children who took part in CHAMPSEA Wave 1. The follow-up study surveyed and interviewed members of the same CHAMPSEA households in Indonesia (East and West Java) and the Philippines (Bulacan and Laguna) including children in middle childhood (then 3, 4 and 5 years and are now 11, 12 and 13) and young adults (then 9, 10 and 11 and are now 17, 18 and 19). Using the same mixed-methods research design utilised in CHAMPSEA Wave 1 that capitalizes on the complementary strengths of quantitative and qualitative methods, CHAMPSEA Wave 2 collects primary data using carefully designed survey instruments in order to create a unique longitudinal data set that will allow the investigation of multiple dimensions of children’s health and well-being.

The Salmon Effect in Internal Labour Migration in India: The Reverse Flow of Return Migrants in Duress
MS AMRITA SHARMA, Centre for Migration and Labour Solutions, India
Large scale rural to urban labour mobility is a part of modern India’s socio-economic reality. Labour migration is the preferred mode of labour recruitment by industry, fuelling nation-wide economic growth. For the Indian rural poor it is the only exit from poverty, howsoever insecure and precarious. While onward migration has received some attention, the fact that a large number of workers return to their source often too early in their productive life cycle and battered by the vagaries of the informal labour market conditions is a phenomenon that has been largely missed. This paper brings together evidence from the three western Indian states of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra to highlight the adverse outcomes of high risk work and poor living conditions on the lives of migrant workers. It maps how an early entry of rural youth into the informal labour market often culminates in early return to the village triggered by worksite injuries, debilitating accidents, or serious illnesses. The paper argues that the costs of unregulated, precarious work often gets transferred in the form of toxicities borne physically by bodies of migrant workers. Villages today have a significant population of workers who have been pushed back from the cities in the prime of their youth often gravely ill or incapacitated and ready to slide back into further poverty. The existing state machinery also fails to provide requisite protection and aid for the pervasive sedentary bias in its policies.

Gendered Burdens from Male Migration: Evidence from Western India
MS PRIYANKA JAIN, Centre for Migration and Labour Solutions, India
Internal migration in India is largely circular, short-distance movement for work. Over three-fourths of labour migrants are men who perform hard, manual and risky work for minimal wages, while their wives and children remain in the village. Dominant discourse refers to such women as the ‘left-behind’. The term ascribes women from migrant households to a distant, rural life, while the stage moves with the male migrant who faces his capitalist employer in the urban labour market. In this talk, we recover ‘left-behind’ women from this obscurity, and analyze the deep relationship that women have with the phenomenon of male migration and its long-term implications on the household. The talk uses evidence from India’s southern Rajasthan to Gujarat migration corridor, where the national trend of male migration is reproduced. Through an investigation of women’s time use across paid and unpaid work for the sustenance of the migrant household; their interactions and relationships with the household, community and village as a migrant’s wife; it throws light on woman’s concealed labour that is needed to keep the household afloat. Strong underlying elements of love, care and service is found to mark this relationship, constituting a gendered burden borne by women to rehabilitate the household from the violence and tensions inflicted by extractive labour markets on their migrant husbands. Upon their return, the migrant husbands are found to carry back the effects of these assaults, such as health ailments, back with to the rural, migrant household. Due to these, marriage’s function as a social contract that requires women to pour in vast amounts of gendered labour, is found to be deepened in the case of migrant households.

Supplementary, Substitutive and Reconstitutive Care; Grandparenting the Left-Behind in East Java
DR BITTIANDRA CHAND SOMAIAH, National University of Singapore
Intergenerational care politics is useful in understanding recalibrations of care within the left-behind family where care arrangements become renegotiated due to parental labour migration. This lens however has largely concentrated on parental rather than grandparental caregiving of grandchildren. In this paper, we argue that grandparents are pivotal to the politics of care and changing family formations within migration contexts in East Java, Indonesia. After establishing the kin context in East Java, we argue that grandparents contribute to care vacuums in specific ways. They are called in to provide supplementary care, substitutive care and even reconstitutive care, depending on the migration and marital status of the parents. The paper emphasizes the often unilateral care-contracts between grandparents and migrant parents which are constrained with respect to rationed material (via remittances) and emotional support (via transnational house-holding) for left-behind children. We draw material primarily from the qualitative interviews of self-identified grandparent carers of left-behind children, and the grandchildren themselves. By considering a variety of family contexts in flux as a result of parental migration (mother, father or both parents) and marital dissolution amidst migration, we examine family situations holistically by taking into account the different modes of care provided by grandparents (occasionally in tandem with aunts) within changing care contexts.

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Amrita Sharma leads the Centre for Migration and Labour Solutions, a knowledge institution specializing in seasonal labour migration and informality studies in western India, set up by Aajeevika Bureau. Her research interests lie in understanding the political economy of informal work and labour migration in India. She is currently engaged in study of occupational health risks among migrant communities engaged in informal work in cities, spanning Mumbai, Surat and Ahmedabad. She has published on a range of related subjects such as changes in India’s agricultural demography, remittances management and creative practices for inclusion of migrant workers in India.

Priyanka Jain leads the research programme at the Centre for Migration and Labour Solutions (CMLS). Her research interests include the political economy of informal work and labour migration, occupational health and safety, housing for migrants and women’s work. In addition to publishing in academic and non-academic platforms, Priyanka is passionate about using knowledge and evidence to strengthen workers’ agency, conscientization and mobilization. In addition, she is centrally involved in the Centre’s activities around teaching and training of grassroots practitioners on migration, labour, social science research and gender. Previously, Priyanka worked for the Singapore Economic Development Board (Singapore) and undertook research for international development projects at the Institute of Development Studies (UK).

Bittiandra Chand Somaiah is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Migration cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She received her PhD in Sociology from Macquarie University. She has been working on the Child Health and Migrant Parents in Southeast Asia (CHAMPSEA) Wave 2 project, with a focus on Indonesia, since 2017. Her research interests include mothering, migration, class, carework, youth and children’s aspirations, multiple modernities, new cosmopolitanisms, intimate citizenship practices, circulations of care, sociologies of the body, gender and emotions.

REGISTRATION

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