Events

This workshop is organized by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (NUS), with partial funding support from the NUS start-up grant titled “Waiting for Returns: Investments of Overseas Filipino Migrant Workers”.

Resilience has been the subject of many scholarly debates and discussions across different fields and disciplines. Within migration studies, analyses of migrant integration and governance have mostly drawn attention to the structural forces that prompt or inhibit migrants’ resilience. Others home in on migrants’ adaptive and transformative practices, emphasizing that resilience is not a static trait, but a highly dynamic and multifaceted process. In contrast to the normative view that resilience only has a single, directional positive outcome, this workshop aims to draw out how migrants’ resilience processes and pathways proceed in uneven and complex ways, not only spatially by extending across multiple countries but also temporally across different life stages. Furthermore, the workshop seeks to expand understandings of how notions of resilience have been or can be reworked and mobilized creatively and collaboratively for more just or caring futures for all migrants.

In light of contemporary political, economic, and demographic transitions in Asia—such as the rise of gig work, digital labor, and ageing populations—this workshop offers a timely window into taking stock of how migrants have built resilience in diverse ways and for different purposes. The proceedings will extend and challenge current understandings of who is considered resilient, vulnerable, or at risk in the context of migration.

We welcome papers that adopt a critical approach towards how discourses and practices of resilience should be (re)conceptualized– what it is, whom it is for, how it proliferates, and to what effects – in the context of migration to and from Asia. Themes to be considered may include but are not limited to the following:

1. How have practices of resilience been presented in domains such as labor migration (skilled and unskilled), transnational familyhood, international student migration, immigrant integration, return migration and re-integration, the ageing-migration nexus, and climate-induced or other forced migrations?
2. Which migrant subjects are deemed as or asked to become resilient and why? How have migrants expanded, challenged or moved beyond such pregiven definitions, categories, and identities as they pursue other resilient processes or trajectories?
3. What are the specific strategies and practices of resilience that migrants undertake to attain residency/citizenship status, alternate forms of mobility, and/or different forms of economic, political, social and environmental stability and security?
4. Which other resources—such as labors involving care or social justice work, and skills and knowledge acquisition—as well as innovative and creative maneuvers or approaches have migrants drawn upon to augment or complement their chosen resilience strategies?
5. What kinds of multi-scalar institutional assemblages and knowledge networks have formed as governing practices or acts of resilience on the ground?
6. Through migrants’ embodied enactments of resilience, what forms of emergent or alternative political imaginaries and temporal relations have materialized in the present or in anticipation of the future?

The workshop proceedings will chart and conceptualize the multiple ways in which resilience has been called upon and enacted in the region and internationally in the context of variegated migration policy regimes, citizenship pathways, and mobilities in sending and receiving countries.

CALL FOR PAPERS HAS ENDED

Authors of selected proposals will be notified in end November 2025. Presenters will be required to submit a draft of their papers (4,000-6,000 words) by 11 March 2026. These papers will be distributed to fellow speakers and chairpersons prior to the workshop and do not need to be fully polished.

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

Prof Elaine Lynn-Ee HO
Asia Research Institute & Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

Asst Prof Vanessa BANTA
Department of Geography, National University of Singapore