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CHAIRPERSON

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

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the ways that eviction shapes Indonesian migrant domestic workers’ journeys from urban margins ‘at home’ to their ‘days off’ from work in global cities. It traces migrants’ life histories as a lens onto the spatial struggles that animate their marginal positions across their migration biographies and the landscapes of transnational urban everyday life. It engages the growing literature on migration infrastructures with an emphasis on the social texture of spatial claims affecting migration experiences. Based on extended fieldwork in West Java (Sukabumi), and shorter-term research in Singapore and the UAE, it reveals both some longstanding processes of socio-spatial exclusion (e.g., migrant indebtedness and poverty, eviction from land and livelihood, resource and labor extraction) as well as some (perhaps surprising) elements of transnational occupancy urbanism (including claims to public space, shared rental housing, and digital sociality).

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Rachel Silvey is Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute and Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning. She is a Faculty Affiliate in CDTS, WGSI, and the Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies Program. She received her PhD in Geography from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a dual BA from the University of California at Santa Cruz in Environmental Studies and Southeast Asian Studies. Professor Silvey is best known for her research on women’s labour and migration in Indonesia. She has published widely in the fields of migration studies, cultural and political geography, gender studies, and critical development. Her major funded research projects have focused on migration, gender, social networks, and economic development in Indonesia; immigration and employment among Southeast Asian-Americans; migration and marginalization in Bangladesh and Indonesia; and religion, rights and Indonesian migrant women workers in Saudi Arabia. Her current work, funded by the US National Science Foundation, with collaborator Professor Rhacel Parreñas examines Indonesian and Filipino domestic workers’ employment in Singapore and the UAE, and she leads the project on migrant workers’ labour conditions for the SSHRC Partnership Project, “Gender, Migration and the Work of Care: Comparative Perspectives,” led by Professor Ito Peng.

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