Defining dreams: young mothers’ agency in constructions of space

Understanding young mothers’ emic, or insiders’, spatial experiences is critical to realizing how their agency manifests in constructing and producing spaces, as opposed to common images of them as passive, vulnerable women living in deprived neighbourhoods. Set in the shrinking region of Parkstad Limburg in the Netherlands, this article draws on in-depth interviews and long-term participant observation in order to explore which modalities of agency emerge from young mothers’ spatial engagements with their neighbourhoods and homes. This article contributes to greater diversity and more agentic representations of young mothers than commonly perceived, and to a nuanced understanding of agency. The findings reveal that these women are continually navigating the social, physical and economic–political dimensions of space, from which four modalities of agency emerge: (1) ‘adhering to norms’, (2) ‘defining dreams’, (3) ‘challenging rules’ and (4) ‘considering options’. Contrary to understandings within a dominant independence-oriented discourse of agency as taking subversive action, this article shows that agency occurs in tacit, routine spatial practices, whilst navigating through individual circumstances and sociospatial structures and norms.     

Working holiday makers in Australia: food security,climate change,and the backpacker tax

This commentary considers an often overlooked contribution to food security in Australia—the labour of working holiday makers. Their ability to act as a flexible and mobile temporary workforce is essential to the maintenance of the Australian agricultural industry. Previously, no tax was payable on income below $18,200, but a 2015 proposal to increase their tax rate sparked a vigorous political debate and so revealed their importance to the agricultural industry. A decline in backpacker numbers would cause agriculture to shrink to cope with smaller workforces. But the effects of climate change are expected to further shrink agricultural areas as extreme events and hotter temperatures impact crops, livestock, and the productivity of agricultural workers. Issues that appear manageable when viewed in isolation, such as increases in the tax rate on working holiday makers, become more problematic when viewed in conjunction with other impacts affecting agriculture. Thus, the ‘backpacker tax’ risks making food security harder to maintain at a time when Australia's agricultural system is already vulnerable to climate change.     

Asylum seekers,Ireland, and the return of the repressed

Abstract

In 2014 residents in Direct Provision Centres for asylum seekers staged a series of protests. The protests, which coincided with the appointment of a new Minister for Justice who announced the Irish government’s plans to reform the asylum system, voiced three clear demands. Firstly, the protestors demanded that all asylum centres be closed; secondly, they demanded that all residents be given the right to remain and work in Ireland; and thirdly, they demanded an end to all deportations. The government’s response to these protests was to appoint a working group in October 2014, made up of representatives of migrant-support NGOs (but without any significant representation of asylum seekers themselves) while also announcing that it intends to reform rather than abolish the system.

Against this background, this paper makes three interlinked theoretical propositions. Firstly, I propose that just as the Irish state and society managed to ignore workhouses, mental health asylums, “mother and baby homes”, Magdalene laundries and industrial schools, they also “manage not to know” of the plight of asylum seekers, precisely because the Direct Provision system isolates asylum applicants, makes them dependent on bed and board and a small “residual income maintenance payment to cover personal requisites”, and makes it difficult for them to organise on a national level. “Managing not to know”, or disavowing, entails the erasure of the Direct Provision system from Ireland’s collective consciousness at a time when increasing emigration is returning to haunt Irish society after years of refusing to confront the pain of emigration. I argue that asylum seekers represent the return of Ireland’s repressed that confronts Irish people, themselves e/migrants par excellence. Secondly, I propose that by taking action and representing themselves, the residents of Direct Provision Centres can no longer be theorised as Agamben’s “bare life”, at the mercy of sovereign power, to whom everything is done and who are therefore not considered active agents in their own right. The third proposition responds to the theme of this special issue, that multiculturalism is “in crisis”, arguing in the conclusion that this “crisis” hardly applies to Ireland, where the brief flirtations with “interculturalism” by state, society but also Irish studies disavow race and racism in favour of a returning obsession with emigration, which enables the continued disavowal of the experiences of asylum seekers in Direct Provision.     

Gender,households and reintegration: everyday lives of returned migrant women in rural northern Ghana

Since the late 1990s, migration of single women from the rural north to the urban south in Ghana has been making up a growing share of migrant streams. While the livelihood strategies of these migrant women in their southern destinations have been recently examined, the experience of reintegration for those who return to their place of origin has rarely been studied. Drawing on qualitative research with migrant women, returned migrant women (RMW) and their family members, this study examines everyday reintegration experiences of RMW within their households in a rural Dagomba community in Northern Region, Ghana. We conceptualise the household as an arena of everyday life wherein RMW exercise agency to learn to generate livelihoods that support their own as well as household members’ joint well-being. We combine this conceptualisation of household with feminist scholars’ recognition of gender as situated process. Our conceptualisation makes it possible to illuminate gender dynamics around the everyday repetitive decision-making acts that constitute livelihood generation as performed by RMW within specific intra-household dynamics in the context of reintegration in the situated community. Through the examination of the diverse and contradictory ways in which RMW exercise agency in making decisions about livelihood strategies within their households in the studied community, we show how the everyday repetitive acts of RMW contribute to micro-transformations of a situated gender ideology.     

Negotiating male gatekeeper violence in team-based research on Bangladeshi migrant women in Malaysia

While the field of migration studies is expanding to understand the nuanced experiences of women across Asia, there has been little discussion of how these studies were conducted. This article draws on the reflective accounts of three researchers on a team project investigating the lived experiences of female Bangladeshi migrant workers in Malaysia. While the research aims centred on understanding the lives of the Bangladeshi migrant women, the team spent a significant amount of time negotiating male gatekeeper violence in the field. The article further describes the researchers’ experiences of sexual harassment and intimidation, and explores these through the complex locations of the migrant workers and the female researchers in the field site. In addition, the article deals with the way in which the team’s feminist research sensibilities were challenged in the context of negotiating that violence. The ethical dilemma of continuing the research in the face of persistent violence was dealt with by discussing approaches employed in managing the violence. Analysing male gatekeeper violence in the field, allowed for conversations around the intersection of migration and masculinities. This auto-ethnography reveals methodological concerns for female researchers and exposes the negotiated nature of the front line of migration research.     

Onward Precarity,Mobility, and Migration among Latin Americans in London

Contributing to debates around the relationships between precarity, mobilities and migration, this paper examines the nature of precarity among onward Latin American (OLA) migrants as they have moved transnationally to multiple destinations from their homelands to southern Europe and onwards to London across different time periods. Drawing on primary research with over 400 OLAs, the discussion highlights how precarity maps onto onward migration trajectories in fractal rather than linear ways. In moving beyond a continuum approach to labour exploitation, the paper develops the concept of “onward precarity” to capture how migrants negotiate intersecting vulnerabilities in holistic spatio‐temporal ways as they move through different structural contexts across the world from origin, through transition to their final destination country over time. These negotiations are underpinned by multiple agentic tactics that revolve around resilience and reworking strategies as onward migrants traverse wider structures of disadvantage in situ and through mobility in different places.     

“Northern Girls”: Cultural Politics of Agency and South China’s Migrant Literature

Abstract:

This paper is concerned with the cultural politics of agency, and explores the relationship between cultural form, migrant experience and social change. It traces the emergence of a range of literary forms in south China and how these new cultural forms provide hitherto unavailable space to contest the state- and market-driven narratives, which tend to link dagongmei’s (rural migrant women’s) sexuality with inexperience and vulnerability on the one hand, and criminality, immorality and incivility on the other. The paper suggests that these newly emerging cultural forms present alternative perspectives on the practical circumstances, moral rationalities and emotional consequences that condition and shape migrant women’s sexual experience, and for this reason, they constitute important points of intervention.     

Thai migrants in Singapore: state,intimacy and desire

In this article, I analyse Thai migration to Singapore, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2004–06) to discuss the experiences of male construction workers and female sex workers in negotiating heterosexuality during their temporary residence. I argue that these Thai migrants engage in transient heterosexual encounters as one of many calculated, strategic ways of negotiating their intimate identity and subjectivity in the survival circuits of this global city. Their transient sexual acts are intimate products of negotiated moves, which form a major part of their semi-anonymous, temporary life in a foreign land. The sexual practices of Thai migrant workers in Singapore, I argue, are best understood by taking the following factors into account: the host government's regulation and control of its migrant population; the foreign workers' economic and social situations of mobility as inscribed in their highly dynamic traveling biographies; and their rationalized willingness and desire to embrace transient sexual intimacies as part of their employment and/or struggling lives in the global city's survival circuits.     

‘Life in Happy Land’: using virtual space and doing motherhood in Hong Kong

This paper examines how a group of Hong Kong working mothers use the internet in performing and realizing their paid work and domestic role identities. The internet is a technology-enabled space and also what Michel de Certeau calls a ‘practiced place’, where its nature and functions are necessarily determined by the actions and practices of agents. Through participant observation and the analysis of a sample of chatroom and forum messages from a user-driven Hong Kong-based parenting website called Happy Land, I examine the relationship between this virtual space and its users. I find that the website has developed beyond its technology-mediated nature into a community of face-to-face friendships and social and emotional support. In effect, this virtual space plays a role in the social reproduction of the contemporary dual-earner family by enabling working mothers who use the website to perform roles in production and reproduction respectively.