Selecting migrants based on skill has become a widely practised migration policy in many countries around the world. Since the late 20th century, research on “skilled” and “highly skilled” migration has raised important questions about the value and ethics of skill-based labour mobility. More recent research has begun to question the concept of skill and …
The Question of Skill in Cross-Border Labour Mobilities Read More »
Everyday Modernism is the first comprehensive documentation of Singapore’s modern built environment. Through a lens of social, cultural, and architectural histories, the book uncovers the many untold stories of the Southeast Asian city-state’s modernization, from the rise of heroic skyscrapers, such as the Pearl Bank Apartments, to the spread of typical utilitarian buildings like the …
Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore Read More »
By training the spotlight on exchanges of and within relations of intimacy, this collection of papers focuses on the intimate labour performed by gendered migrant subjects in a variety of settings ranging from homes in the city and rural villages, toilets in transnational corporations to public entertainment spots. It contributes to the discussion on intimate …
Outsourcing the Polity offers a new account of social outsourcing in post-independence Myanmar, demonstrating how the bankrupt post-socialist junta mediated market reform in the 1990s and 2000s and forced private and non-state actors to take the burden for social welfare. Informed by research during Myanmar’s decade of partial civilian rule (2011–2021), Gerard McCarthy examines how ideals and …
Outsourcing the Polity: Non-State Welfare, Inequality and Resistance in Myanmar Read More »
This edited volume explores core questions on education and transnational mobility in a time characterized by a global pandemic, recasting them through the lenses of regimes, experiences, and aspirations. The volume brings together 19 short essays in the form of letters addressed to the coronavirus and written by international students, together with nine striking illustrations …
International Student Mobilities and Voices in the Asia-Pacific: Letters to Coronavirus Read More »
Passport Entanglements examines the problems with documents issued to Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong and explores the larger role that passports and other types of documentation play in gendered migration, precarious labor, and bureaucracy. Focusing on the politics and inequalities embedded in passports, anthropologist Nicole Constable considers how these instruments determine legal status and dictate …
Passport Entanglements: Protection, Care, and Precarious Migrations Read More »
The closely related processes of migration and diversification call for greater scrutiny of how contemporary arrival cities incorporate increasingly diverse groups of newcomers through practices and processes of differential inclusion. This special issue highlights arrival cities in the Asia-Pacific region, attending to how they are being transformed by the wide-ranging temporal and spatial dimensions of migrant-driven diversification. Rather than …
Studies of racism against migrants have recently attempted to move away from the presumed dichotomy between “white” and “Others”, yet the focus of much research remains predominantly trained on “white” people racializing “Others”: whether Black, Asian or Muslim. Attending only to this “white”/”Other” binary homogenises select groups of non-“white” including Asians. This approach also ignores …
Asian Migration and New Racism: Beyond Colour and the “West” Read More »
What goes into the ideological sustenance of an illiberal capitalist democracy? While much of the critical discussion of the media in authoritarian contexts focus on state power, the emphasis on strong states tend to perpetuate misnomers about the media as mere tools of the state and sustain myths about their absolute power. Turning to the …
Performing Fear in Television Production: Practices of an Illiberal Democracy Read More »
