Circulating sadness: witnessing Filipina mothers' stories of family separation

I reflect upon a collaborative research project with activist groups at the Kalayaan Centre in Vancouver, in which we collected stories of family separation, loss, grief and traumatic returns to more fully trace the impacts of the Canadian temporary work visa program (the Live-in Caregiver Program), which brings mostly Filipino women to Canada as live-in domestic workers. Our hope is that these stories of maternal loss will find an audience and evoke an affective response among policy-makers and a wide public beyond the Filipino community in ways that earlier critiques of the program have not. The article draws upon critical literatures on trauma and testimony to consider some of the risks of circulating these kinds of testimonials, and the possibilities of moving the audience from the position of spectator to witness. I then work closely with two mothers' testimonies to experiment with ways of establishing a ‘more difficult contract’ between those who give testimony and those who receive it, one that creates a complex ethical and political space in which the audience is required to register their own complicity in the other's loss or grief. I consider of the possibilities of assembling stories that tell a collective history without reducing the complexity of individual's lives into the same sad story of victimization, and of telling these stories so that the categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mother are exhausted and the listener/reader is forced to listen/read more closely, just beyond the expected story line or cultural cliché.     

国际侨汇对移民来源国经济发展的影响——国外学术观点综述

论文从侨汇对贫困和收入分配的影响、侨汇对消费和投资的影响、侨汇的危机救助作用和对经济增长的影响、侨汇对公共投资和官方援助的影响、侨汇的＂道德风险＂和侨汇对人才流失的影响、侨汇对荷兰病和国际贸易的影响等六个方面,对国外的一些学术观点进行了分析阐述,认为前期的研究为本领域的研究提供了非常有价值的开拓性成果和坚实基础,但是目前国际侨汇的研究多集中于国别和微观的领域,在宏观综合分析、比较分析和理论探索方面还比较欠缺,诸多领域的研究工作还需要继续挖掘和探索,不少研究结论存在较大争议,因此还有许多问题亟需做进一步研究。     

1949-1958年工矿企业青年工人的技术培养--以师徒合同为中心

新中国成立后,随着国民经济的恢复与发展,对技术工人的需求迅速增加。为尽快培养更多的青年技术工人和提高他们的技术水平,一些工矿企业充分利用师傅带徒弟的方式,开始推广订立师徒合同。在各单位的组织配合下,师徒合同这种技术传承方式得以广泛推广,对提高青年技术工人的水平产生了积极作用。但与此同时,师徒合同存在的缺陷、国家有限的物质条件、奖励与考工制度的不完善、速成教育与培训的局限性等因素限制了师徒合同的继续发展。尽管如此,师徒合同在工矿企业内的推行,在一定程度上营造了鼓励技术学习的整体环境,促进了“尊师爱徒”新型师徒关系的建立,提高了青年技术工人的技术水平,提升了劳动生产效率,有利于新中国工业化建设的顺利开展。     

美国加州圣地亚哥华人专业技术新移民的跨国认同调查与研究——移民跨国认同的个案分析

论文以美国加州圣地亚哥中国大陆的专业技术新移民为个案,通过问卷形式,从双语能力、认同类型、文化保持与文化适应、跨国活动和跨国倾向等方面对受访的华人群体进行了调查。通过对调查结果的梳理分析,得出三点结论:一是大部分受访者具有较强的中英双语能力,这既是其高度融入美国主流社会的基础,也是其较强文化适应程度的表现;二是在受访的华人群体中,规律性、经常性的跨国活动并不明显,但其跨国认同度较高;三是在受访的华人群体中,跨国认同是一个多层次、多类型的结合体,它既包括以中国人的族裔认同为主、美国人的国家认同为次的双重认同,也包括混杂性的中美双文化认同。     

Hien's shed: (re)framing images of female immigrant home-based clothing workers

Campaigns in support of home-based clothing workers (or ‘outworkers’ as they are more commonly known in Australia) deploy powerful images of the exploitative underside of fashion. The migrant woman huddled over her machine has become the quintessential image of campaigns directed against this exploitation. This article engages critically with the politics of such image-making. By examining how frames simultaneously shrink and magnify the image produced it raises questions about what these images exclude or expel and whether and how this matters. It also offers an alternative frame of the female immigrant outworker – an up-close portrait of Hien, a Vietnamese woman who works at home sewing clothes in her suburban shed. The article introduces Hien through a condensed collection of her self-narratives, before moving on to consider how a trade union and community-based movement against outworker exploitation mobilised images of suffering and injured Vietnamese women to promote its cause. It asks how these images speak for and represent women like Hien and suggests that their political ‘success’ relies to some extent on the women being ‘unseen’ and made to ‘unspeak’. Finally, through the metaphor of space, it proffers an expanded dimension to the already framed images invoking Hien's shed as a space that both produces and disciplines her: ultimately, a ‘transitional space’ between the external and internal worlds that shape and constrain her.     

Cultivating belonging: refugees,urban gardens,and placemaking in the Midwest,U.S.A.

In the aftermath of failed urban renewal projects and the decline of central cities, community gardens have become increasingly popular in urban planning, public health, and environmental circles. However, gardens still occupy a tenuous and contradictory position in the city. While urban gardens are bounded spaces, they are also dynamic places where different understandings of (agri)culture, land use, and belonging are enacted and contested. In this paper, we identify three distinct ways in which gardens in a small Midwestern city are used and experienced by refugee gardeners and local officials: the material garden, the imagined garden, and the community’s garden. The material garden, embodied in the biophysical aspects of the soil, seeds, and resources needed to cultivate plants, shapes what can grow in the garden and the transformations by refugee agricultural practices. While planners tend to see urban gardens as temporary spaces that can promote limited pathways of migrant incorporation, gardeners practice, and imagine gardening differently through social, cultural, and economic interactions. We argue that these practices challenge traditional understandings of nature and urban planning, and can promote inclusive understandings of agriculture, cities, and sustainability, embodied in the ideal of the community’s garden.     

Trafficked Enough? Missing Bodies,Migrant Labour Exploitation,and the Classification of Trafficking Victims in Singapore

Critical geographical research has recently drawn attention to representations of vulnerable or exploited groups that articulate racist or neo‐colonial imaginations, including where these geographical imaginations are implicated in the classification and characterisation of groups for legal purposes. In the case of vulnerable groups of migrants such practices can be invoked to create distinctions that justify the socio‐spatial exclusion or containment, thus oftentimes having profound implications for real people who must manoeuvre the consequences of classification. The paper builds on this strand of inquiry by exploring the imaginaries surrounding trafficking victimhood and the implications of classification for temporary labour migrants in Singapore into “trafficked” and “non‐trafficked” categories. I argue that in the Singaporean context government interest in maintaining the current labour/migration regime is equally as significant as racist and neo‐colonial imaginations and intersect with the latter in productive ways to sort vulnerable migrants into categories of trafficked and non‐trafficked.     

Lives Versus Livelihoods? Deepening the Regulatory Debates on Soil Fumigants in California's Strawberry Industry

Soil fumigants have been critical to the California strawberry industry's success, but they are also highly toxic to farmworkers and nearby residents. This article traces recent regulatory debates over restrictions on their use which were cast as a contest of lives and livelihoods: activists emphasized the danger of the chemicals while industry emphasized their necessity. Activists’ claims were typical of environmental justice battles that focus on disproportionate toxic exposure to marginalized populations, but I problematize that they downplayed industry concern with farmworker jobs. Drawing on Marx, Foucault and recent literature on surplus populations and disposability, I suggest that the analytical separation of lives and livelihoods is complicit in the making of disposable workers such as California farmworkers. Strategically, upholding the separation was a missed opportunity to leverage the strawberry industry's new‐found concern with farmworker employment and push for measures that protect current and future farmworker health.     

Kuwait is home: perceptions of happiness and belonging among second plus generation non-citizens in Kuwait

Kuwait is an oil-rich Gulf country where temporary foreign workers and their families comprise two-thirds of the population, without access to permanent residence or citizenship. Several residents, however, stay for long durations, raising a second or third generation there. Surveys of second plus generation non-nationals were conducted among 973 high school students and 246 working persons in 2012. These surveys were analysed in order to: (i) Advance the understanding of how non-citizens relate to their impermanent status in terms of being happy in Kuwait and considering it home; and (ii) To identify characteristics that enhance the above perceptions. Among students, 48 per cent were extremely happy and 52 per cent considered it as home very strongly; corresponding percentages among working persons were 35 per cent and 48 per cent, respectively. Arab nationality, female gender, longer duration of residence and bilingual proficiency were positively associated with perceptions of belongingness, which may enhance societal harmony.     

Family education support to rural migrant children in China: evidence from Shenzhen

Rural migrant children have become a fast-growing population in China as a consequence of the large-scale population flow from rural to urban areas. Besides the dual-structure hukou system, which restrains rural migrants from upward mobility, family capital also plays an important role in providing family educational support to rural migrant children. Using the data from P District and N District of Shenzhen in 2013, this paper explores the present status of three dimensions of family capital and five aspects of family educational support to Chinese rural migrant children, as well as the correlation between family capital and family educational support from perspectives of migration status (hukou), life course (children’s age), and school type. Constrained by inadequate family capital in multiple dimensions manifested by less education, lower income, and limited social networks, etc., parents of rural migrant children provide less family educational support in nearly every aspect compared with parents of urban local children. Among rural migrant children, those in private migrant schools receive the least support from their parents.