Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Anju Mary Paul, Yale-NUS College, Singapore

ABSTRACT

There is now a large literature on skilled migration, which uses multiple definitions and concepts, theories and understandings of skilled migrants. However, the geographies of skilled migration have rarely considered the geographies of skills – the spatial and temporal relations through which skills get meaning, are accrued and claimed, and how skills come to matter. This paper addresses that gap. In doing so, it contributes to the growing literature on how to de-migranticize migration studies, i.e. how to shift away from the migrant as the analytical object of migration studies. Towards this, this presentation argues for interjecting the geographies of skills into skilled migration research. It begins by exploring the concept of skilled migration and its definitional multiplicity. It then goes on to examine the sites and the spatially distributed networks and spatio-temporal legacies through which skills get meaning, are acquired, and transferred. It then explores why this geography of skills matters and how questions of the value of skills are being addressed geographically within normative registers – political-economic and ethical. It briefly outlines the questions raised by labour arbitrage in a mobile world. The paper ends by discussing some of the ethical questions that the geographies of skills interjects into the geographies of skilled migration.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Parvati Raghuram is Professor in Geography and Migration at the Open University. She came to the UK after her MA in India. She has published widely on retheorising migration of international students and skilled migrants. She is currently leading a grant on contextualising peace education in Nigeria and Zimbabwe. In this project she is looking at decolonisation of education as a pedagogical challenge in interdisciplinary and intercontinental research. She has co-authored Gender, Migration and Social Reproduction (Palgrave), The Practice of Cultural Studies (Sage), Gender and International Migration in Europe (Routledge) and co-edited South Asian Women in the Diaspora (Berg) and Tracing Indian Diaspora: Contexts, Memories, Representations (Sage). She has written for policy audiences having co-authored research papers for a number of think-tanks. She co-edits the journal South Asian Diaspora with the Centre for Study of Diaspora, Hyderabad and the Palgrave Pivot series Mobility and Politics with Martin Geiger and William Walters both at Ottawa.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you complete the form below to RSVP.