With Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Theodora Lam, and Kristel Acedera. The prevailing neoliberal labour migrat... more With Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Theodora Lam, and Kristel Acedera. The prevailing neoliberal labour migration regime in Asia is underpinned by principles of enforced transience: the overwhelming majority of migrants – particularly those seeking low-skilled, low-waged work – are admitted into host nation-states on the basis of short-term, time-bound contracts, with little or no possibility of family reunification or permanent settlement at the destination. As families go transnational, ‘family times’ become inextricably intertwined with the ‘times of migration’ (Cwerner, 2001). In this context, for many migrant-sending families in Southeast Asian source countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines, parental migration as a strategy for migrating out of poverty or for socio-economic advancement requires the left-behind family to resiliently absorb the uncertainties of parental leaving and returning. Based on research on Indonesian and Filipino rural households (studied from 2008 through 2017) including paired life-story interviews with parental/non-parental adult carers and children, the article investigates the crucial links between the time construct of seriality in migration on the one hand, and the temporal structure of family based social reproduction on the other. It first focuses on how serial migration produces, and is produced by, spiraling needs and expanding aspirations, hence creating its own momentum for continuity. The paper then explores how competing temporal logics create difficult choices for migrants, leading to the recalibration of priorities within constrained resources. By drawing attention to the co-existence of and contradictions between multiple temporalities in the lives of migrants and their families, a critical temporalities framework yields new insights in understanding the social reproduction of families in a migratory context.
With Brenda S.A. Yeoh. Parental labour migration requires recalibrations of care arrangements wit... more With Brenda S.A. Yeoh. Parental labour migration requires recalibrations of care arrangements within the left-behind family. Existing studies of left-behind families, however, have largely concentrated on parental rather than grandparental caregiving of grandchildren. We argue that grandparents are pivotal to care work and changing family formations within migrant-sending villages. Grandparents provide supplementary care, substitutive care and even reconstitutive care, depending on the migration and marital status of the parents. The paper emphasizes the often unilateral care-contracts between grandparents and migrant parents, drawing on material primarily from the qualitative interviews of grandparent carers of left-behind children, and the grandchildren themselves. By considering a variety of family contexts in flux as a result of parental migration (mother, father or both parents) and marital dissolution amidst migration, we examine family situations holistically by taking into account the different modes of care provided by grandparents (occasionally in tandem with aunts) within changing care contexts. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718523000933https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10347432/
https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2021.1997952 Within transnational contexts, ethnic minority Coor... more https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2021.1997952 Within transnational contexts, ethnic minority Coorg festivals are conducted via the prominence of festival foodwork by Kodavathee immigrant mothers. In the absence of geographical proximity to the homeland of rural Kodagu due to (im)migration, festival food becomes a means to enculturate ‘good’ Coorg diasporic children with appropriate affiliative culinary identification to this ‘vanishing’ community. (Intra)domestic efforts to create emotional emplacement for transnational Coorg children are strategically positioned viz-a-viz other pan-‘Hindu’, Brahmanical religious festivals. Qualitative interviews yielded how festival food took on a significant role in firstly: vicarious performances of emplacing Kodagu within the (im)migrant Coorg family context; and secondly in nesting children within an insider food culture which is celebrated in-group yet underplayed in more pan-Hindu contexts.
With Brenda S.A. Yeoh. This paper explores the temporalities and emotions of youth left-behind by... more With Brenda S.A. Yeoh. This paper explores the temporalities and emotions of youth left-behind by migrant parents by using Jennifer Lois’ temporal emotion work as an analytical lens to foreground youth’s management of conflicting feelings by reworking particular experiences of time. We extend Lois’ concepts of ‘sequencing’ (strategic ordering of emotions and time) and ‘savouring’ (intentional maximizing of specific times) to include a contextualized, gendered angle, while also engaging with the additional concept of ‘supressing’. The work draws on qualitative interviews conducted in 2017 with left-behind youth from migrant households from rural migrant-sending villages in two districts in Java, Indonesia. By highlighting youth’s shifting temporal emotions and how aspirations and experiences of left-behindness are affected, our research reveals gendered strategies of temporal emotion work. Young women enact ‘sequencing’ and ‘savouring’, aspiring to stay as a means of restorative, temporal-emotional justice for their families. Conversely, young men are more inclined to enact the ‘suppressing’ of emotions while aspiring for migration. Among a generation that has grown up in the wake of parental migration, most youth conform to traditional gendered scripts within an older culture of masculinized circular migration.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2021.1952170
Link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1aojo_dwXqluBE
Collaboration in qualitative research is inc... more Link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1aojo_dwXqluBE Collaboration in qualitative research is increasingly encouraged and rewarded in many national and global funding schemes. Collaboration by scholars in (radically) different disciplines using different methods is becoming common, however less attention is given to collaboration using shared approaches across closely-related disciplines. This paper considers the ethnographic insights of four researchers from different (but related) disciplinary backgrounds who conducted collaborative fieldwork in one site-West Coast Park (WCP) in Singapore-over two periods of fieldwork. We conducted an experimental collaboration to study emotions, affect and mundane space through sharing and comparing our interpretations of everyday life in WCP. We ask, how do researchers capture or speak to the affective properties circulated during collaboration? Second, how should researchers approach the affective properties of mundane activities in space? Our paper develops a four-fold 'affective inventory' consisting of: a) multiple-attunements to the (un)familiar; b) attentiveness to affective affordances and their governing effects; c) attentiveness to involuntary affective charges, and; d) awareness of how our diverse affective biographies affect the (im)perceptibility of affect. We propose that such an inventory functions as a valuable guidepost in navigating collaborative ethnographies, especially when exploring emotions and affect.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2020
With Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Theodora Lam, and Kristel F Acedera. The prevailing labor migration regime... more With Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Theodora Lam, and Kristel F Acedera. The prevailing labor migration regime in Asia is underpinned by rotating-door principles of enforced transience, where low-wage migrant labor gains admission into host nation-states based on short-term, time-limited contracts and where family reunification and permanent settlement at destination are explicitly prohibited. In this context, we ask how migrant-sending families in Southeast Asian “source” countries— Indonesia and the Philippines—sustain family life in the long-term absence of one or both parents (often mothers). Through temporal concepts of rhythm, rupture, and reversal, we focus on how temporal modalities of care for left-behind children intersect with gendered power geometries in animating transnational family politics around care. First, by paying heed to the structuring effects of rhythm on social life, we show how routinized care rhythms built around mothers as caregivers have a normalizing and naturalizing effect on the conduct of social life and commonplace understanding of family well-being. Second, we explore the potential rupture to care rhythms triggered by the migration of mothers turned breadwinners and the extent to which gendered care regimes are either conserved, reconstituted, or disrupted in everyday patterns and practices of care. Third, we examine the circumstances under which gender role reversal becomes enduring, gains legitimacy among a range of poly care rhythms, or is quickly undone with the return migration of mothers in homecoming. The analysis is based primarily on research on Indonesian and Filipino rural households conducted in 2017 using paired life story interviews with children and their parental or nonparental adult caregivers.
With Brenda S.A. Yeoh. By examining the aspirations of young, rural Indonesian women who, unlike ... more With Brenda S.A. Yeoh. By examining the aspirations of young, rural Indonesian women who, unlike their parents, want to stay behind rather than migrate for work, we look at how these women's experiences of feeling left-behind affect their quests for alternative futures. Using a household relational lens, we employ the mediating concept of enough (cukup) to analyse the aspirations of young women wishing to remain at home. By focusing on their commitment to inter-generational continuity and care rather than a lack of choice, we are able to offset the discourses associated with the culture of migration and its accompanying remittance euphoria. Our findings showed three main reasons for their choice. First, these young women pursue remittance-funded higher education as a counter to parental sacrifice. Second, staying allows them both to provide the hands-on care they themselves were denied as children and to pursue meaningful local careers. Third, the idea that migration has been 'enough' is a rational response to the social risks with which migration confronts a family.
This paper presents a women-centred study of the religious identities and practices of the diaspo... more This paper presents a women-centred study of the religious identities and practices of the diasporic Coorgs of Singapore through interviews and observances of their ‘religious’ practices, focusing on how these first-generation immigrants have created adaptive techniques of ancestor worship and the worship of Kaveriamma to perform their Coorg identity away from their ancestral homeland. Their spiritual practices in the home are contrasted with their engagements in broader Singaporean Hindu society, where issues of cultural identity and religious practice serve as a lens to comprehend how contemporary diasporic ‘religiosities’ among Coorg women (Kodavathees) are negotiated. The diasporic Kodavathees have found innovative ways to maintain their ‘religious’ practices and assert their distinct ethnic identity in Singapore, where being Hindu is often narrowly defined by broad social acceptance of the official ethnic taxonomies of the state.
This chapter engages with broad debates from a range of disciplines surrounding transnational par... more This chapter engages with broad debates from a range of disciplines surrounding transnational parenting in Asia, to identify and analyze gaps in the literature. Providing a case study from my work on social reconstructions of mothering, I offer that, while moral communities are often founded upon thick social relations, my participants’ practices of maternal transnational care towards others depict an inter-weaving of both thick and thin social relations. While I continue in the tradition of work which uncovers everyday transnationalism ‘on the ground’, I emphasize the gendered, maternal dimensions of performing this within the g/local South Asian, specifically Coorg, context using instances of kinwork, emotions, and (transnational) charity beyond the community. I suggest the construction of extended moral communities of co-responsibility is at play in the maternal-inspired generational, gendered motherwork of my participants and their trans-domestic, transnational citizenship practices of raising model citizens in global cities. I finally propose a research agenda for the future of the subfield of gender and transnational parenting.
Reference entry in 'Encyclopedia of Indian Religions; Hinduism and Tribal Religions' edited by Pa... more Reference entry in 'Encyclopedia of Indian Religions; Hinduism and Tribal Religions' edited by Pankaj Jain, Rita Sherma and Madhu Khanna
Book Review of 'A subaltern history of the Indian diaspora in Singapore; the gradual disappearanc... more Book Review of 'A subaltern history of the Indian diaspora in Singapore; the gradual disappearance of untouchability 1872–1965 (Intersections: colonial and postcolonial histories)' by John Solomon, Oxon and New York, Routledge, 2016,200 pp., £120.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781138955899
Book Review of:
'The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder' by TULASI SRINIVAS
Durham, ... more Book Review of: 'The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder' by TULASI SRINIVAS Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2018
In this edited collection of papers, narratives and photo-documentation from research conducted u... more In this edited collection of papers, narratives and photo-documentation from research conducted under the Gender Network Project from 1999 to 2006, Kerala society is critiqued from feminist angles after removing the rose-tinted lenses of its internationally-acclaimed high literacy status. It provides a unique case study for the mixed blessings that achievement of statewide literacy brings to the women of this specific South Indian state, often used as a model-state for the attainment of basic human rights in international discourses on development, social welfare and justice. The all-Indian, mixed-gendered team of contributors to this volume come from a range of disciplines, including economics , development studies, psychoanalysis, rehabilitation psychology, history and photo journalism. The volume starts off with a chapter authored by the editor herself. She embarks on the counter-intuitive claim against the translation of high literacy rates among Kerala's women to a relatively high status. She thus critiques Kerala as a model state to mimic — in terms of the recorded high levels of gender development according to conventional indicators which is naively equated to a high standing of women. Such indicators include those found in economic surveys and census reports from the Government of India, Government of Kerala, and the United Nations Development Programme. The multi-dimension-ality of gender politics, such as gender-bias discourses, women's (re)productive labour not being recognised as work, and patriarchal attitudes and beliefs, among other things, required multiple modalities and methodologies. The researchers thus made methodologi-cal commitments to the immeasurable and unquantifiable by paying close attention to outliers generated by quantitative research projects and to qualitative data collected from detailed life histories, case studies and focus group discussions. Some notorious and noteworthy information shared about Kerala include having one of the top rates of recorded crimes against women, having one of the highest incidences of domestic violence, increasing proof of female foeticide, and some of the lowest female force participation rates. Rich qualitative interviews with women across various castes, class and contexts uncovered a lack of liberties one would tend not to associate with possessing literacy. Conventional indicators seem to sanitise for the benefit of the public, national and international gaze the obvious gendered disparities in the everyday lives of women of the region. The quest to decode this riddle of the state's excelling under general gender development indicators, while also showing distressing signs of women's oppression , drives the momentum of this book forward. Mukhopadhyay historically and sociologically removes the anchors that hold and perpetuate the popular belief in the 'positive' stereotype of the Malayalee matriarch. This conventional knowledge she describes has been born out of the high status accorded to women in matrilineal systems prevalent in some parts, the historical emphasis that social reformers have placed on women within the reform process, the early outreach of female education, family planning and communism. While conventional health and literacy indicators were thus relatively superior to other Indian states, recent falling sex ratios and rising dowry rates have yet to put a damper on public discernment sustained largely through a politics of distraction.
With Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Theodora Lam, and Kristel Acedera. The prevailing neoliberal labour migrat... more With Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Theodora Lam, and Kristel Acedera. The prevailing neoliberal labour migration regime in Asia is underpinned by principles of enforced transience: the overwhelming majority of migrants – particularly those seeking low-skilled, low-waged work – are admitted into host nation-states on the basis of short-term, time-bound contracts, with little or no possibility of family reunification or permanent settlement at the destination. As families go transnational, ‘family times’ become inextricably intertwined with the ‘times of migration’ (Cwerner, 2001). In this context, for many migrant-sending families in Southeast Asian source countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines, parental migration as a strategy for migrating out of poverty or for socio-economic advancement requires the left-behind family to resiliently absorb the uncertainties of parental leaving and returning. Based on research on Indonesian and Filipino rural households (studied from 2008 through 2017) including paired life-story interviews with parental/non-parental adult carers and children, the article investigates the crucial links between the time construct of seriality in migration on the one hand, and the temporal structure of family based social reproduction on the other. It first focuses on how serial migration produces, and is produced by, spiraling needs and expanding aspirations, hence creating its own momentum for continuity. The paper then explores how competing temporal logics create difficult choices for migrants, leading to the recalibration of priorities within constrained resources. By drawing attention to the co-existence of and contradictions between multiple temporalities in the lives of migrants and their families, a critical temporalities framework yields new insights in understanding the social reproduction of families in a migratory context.
With Brenda S.A. Yeoh. Parental labour migration requires recalibrations of care arrangements wit... more With Brenda S.A. Yeoh. Parental labour migration requires recalibrations of care arrangements within the left-behind family. Existing studies of left-behind families, however, have largely concentrated on parental rather than grandparental caregiving of grandchildren. We argue that grandparents are pivotal to care work and changing family formations within migrant-sending villages. Grandparents provide supplementary care, substitutive care and even reconstitutive care, depending on the migration and marital status of the parents. The paper emphasizes the often unilateral care-contracts between grandparents and migrant parents, drawing on material primarily from the qualitative interviews of grandparent carers of left-behind children, and the grandchildren themselves. By considering a variety of family contexts in flux as a result of parental migration (mother, father or both parents) and marital dissolution amidst migration, we examine family situations holistically by taking into account the different modes of care provided by grandparents (occasionally in tandem with aunts) within changing care contexts. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718523000933https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10347432/
https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2021.1997952 Within transnational contexts, ethnic minority Coor... more https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2021.1997952 Within transnational contexts, ethnic minority Coorg festivals are conducted via the prominence of festival foodwork by Kodavathee immigrant mothers. In the absence of geographical proximity to the homeland of rural Kodagu due to (im)migration, festival food becomes a means to enculturate ‘good’ Coorg diasporic children with appropriate affiliative culinary identification to this ‘vanishing’ community. (Intra)domestic efforts to create emotional emplacement for transnational Coorg children are strategically positioned viz-a-viz other pan-‘Hindu’, Brahmanical religious festivals. Qualitative interviews yielded how festival food took on a significant role in firstly: vicarious performances of emplacing Kodagu within the (im)migrant Coorg family context; and secondly in nesting children within an insider food culture which is celebrated in-group yet underplayed in more pan-Hindu contexts.
With Brenda S.A. Yeoh. This paper explores the temporalities and emotions of youth left-behind by... more With Brenda S.A. Yeoh. This paper explores the temporalities and emotions of youth left-behind by migrant parents by using Jennifer Lois’ temporal emotion work as an analytical lens to foreground youth’s management of conflicting feelings by reworking particular experiences of time. We extend Lois’ concepts of ‘sequencing’ (strategic ordering of emotions and time) and ‘savouring’ (intentional maximizing of specific times) to include a contextualized, gendered angle, while also engaging with the additional concept of ‘supressing’. The work draws on qualitative interviews conducted in 2017 with left-behind youth from migrant households from rural migrant-sending villages in two districts in Java, Indonesia. By highlighting youth’s shifting temporal emotions and how aspirations and experiences of left-behindness are affected, our research reveals gendered strategies of temporal emotion work. Young women enact ‘sequencing’ and ‘savouring’, aspiring to stay as a means of restorative, temporal-emotional justice for their families. Conversely, young men are more inclined to enact the ‘suppressing’ of emotions while aspiring for migration. Among a generation that has grown up in the wake of parental migration, most youth conform to traditional gendered scripts within an older culture of masculinized circular migration.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2021.1952170
Link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1aojo_dwXqluBE
Collaboration in qualitative research is inc... more Link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1aojo_dwXqluBE Collaboration in qualitative research is increasingly encouraged and rewarded in many national and global funding schemes. Collaboration by scholars in (radically) different disciplines using different methods is becoming common, however less attention is given to collaboration using shared approaches across closely-related disciplines. This paper considers the ethnographic insights of four researchers from different (but related) disciplinary backgrounds who conducted collaborative fieldwork in one site-West Coast Park (WCP) in Singapore-over two periods of fieldwork. We conducted an experimental collaboration to study emotions, affect and mundane space through sharing and comparing our interpretations of everyday life in WCP. We ask, how do researchers capture or speak to the affective properties circulated during collaboration? Second, how should researchers approach the affective properties of mundane activities in space? Our paper develops a four-fold 'affective inventory' consisting of: a) multiple-attunements to the (un)familiar; b) attentiveness to affective affordances and their governing effects; c) attentiveness to involuntary affective charges, and; d) awareness of how our diverse affective biographies affect the (im)perceptibility of affect. We propose that such an inventory functions as a valuable guidepost in navigating collaborative ethnographies, especially when exploring emotions and affect.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2020
With Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Theodora Lam, and Kristel F Acedera. The prevailing labor migration regime... more With Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Theodora Lam, and Kristel F Acedera. The prevailing labor migration regime in Asia is underpinned by rotating-door principles of enforced transience, where low-wage migrant labor gains admission into host nation-states based on short-term, time-limited contracts and where family reunification and permanent settlement at destination are explicitly prohibited. In this context, we ask how migrant-sending families in Southeast Asian “source” countries— Indonesia and the Philippines—sustain family life in the long-term absence of one or both parents (often mothers). Through temporal concepts of rhythm, rupture, and reversal, we focus on how temporal modalities of care for left-behind children intersect with gendered power geometries in animating transnational family politics around care. First, by paying heed to the structuring effects of rhythm on social life, we show how routinized care rhythms built around mothers as caregivers have a normalizing and naturalizing effect on the conduct of social life and commonplace understanding of family well-being. Second, we explore the potential rupture to care rhythms triggered by the migration of mothers turned breadwinners and the extent to which gendered care regimes are either conserved, reconstituted, or disrupted in everyday patterns and practices of care. Third, we examine the circumstances under which gender role reversal becomes enduring, gains legitimacy among a range of poly care rhythms, or is quickly undone with the return migration of mothers in homecoming. The analysis is based primarily on research on Indonesian and Filipino rural households conducted in 2017 using paired life story interviews with children and their parental or nonparental adult caregivers.
With Brenda S.A. Yeoh. By examining the aspirations of young, rural Indonesian women who, unlike ... more With Brenda S.A. Yeoh. By examining the aspirations of young, rural Indonesian women who, unlike their parents, want to stay behind rather than migrate for work, we look at how these women's experiences of feeling left-behind affect their quests for alternative futures. Using a household relational lens, we employ the mediating concept of enough (cukup) to analyse the aspirations of young women wishing to remain at home. By focusing on their commitment to inter-generational continuity and care rather than a lack of choice, we are able to offset the discourses associated with the culture of migration and its accompanying remittance euphoria. Our findings showed three main reasons for their choice. First, these young women pursue remittance-funded higher education as a counter to parental sacrifice. Second, staying allows them both to provide the hands-on care they themselves were denied as children and to pursue meaningful local careers. Third, the idea that migration has been 'enough' is a rational response to the social risks with which migration confronts a family.
This paper presents a women-centred study of the religious identities and practices of the diaspo... more This paper presents a women-centred study of the religious identities and practices of the diasporic Coorgs of Singapore through interviews and observances of their ‘religious’ practices, focusing on how these first-generation immigrants have created adaptive techniques of ancestor worship and the worship of Kaveriamma to perform their Coorg identity away from their ancestral homeland. Their spiritual practices in the home are contrasted with their engagements in broader Singaporean Hindu society, where issues of cultural identity and religious practice serve as a lens to comprehend how contemporary diasporic ‘religiosities’ among Coorg women (Kodavathees) are negotiated. The diasporic Kodavathees have found innovative ways to maintain their ‘religious’ practices and assert their distinct ethnic identity in Singapore, where being Hindu is often narrowly defined by broad social acceptance of the official ethnic taxonomies of the state.
This chapter engages with broad debates from a range of disciplines surrounding transnational par... more This chapter engages with broad debates from a range of disciplines surrounding transnational parenting in Asia, to identify and analyze gaps in the literature. Providing a case study from my work on social reconstructions of mothering, I offer that, while moral communities are often founded upon thick social relations, my participants’ practices of maternal transnational care towards others depict an inter-weaving of both thick and thin social relations. While I continue in the tradition of work which uncovers everyday transnationalism ‘on the ground’, I emphasize the gendered, maternal dimensions of performing this within the g/local South Asian, specifically Coorg, context using instances of kinwork, emotions, and (transnational) charity beyond the community. I suggest the construction of extended moral communities of co-responsibility is at play in the maternal-inspired generational, gendered motherwork of my participants and their trans-domestic, transnational citizenship practices of raising model citizens in global cities. I finally propose a research agenda for the future of the subfield of gender and transnational parenting.
Reference entry in 'Encyclopedia of Indian Religions; Hinduism and Tribal Religions' edited by Pa... more Reference entry in 'Encyclopedia of Indian Religions; Hinduism and Tribal Religions' edited by Pankaj Jain, Rita Sherma and Madhu Khanna
Book Review of 'A subaltern history of the Indian diaspora in Singapore; the gradual disappearanc... more Book Review of 'A subaltern history of the Indian diaspora in Singapore; the gradual disappearance of untouchability 1872–1965 (Intersections: colonial and postcolonial histories)' by John Solomon, Oxon and New York, Routledge, 2016,200 pp., £120.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781138955899
Book Review of:
'The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder' by TULASI SRINIVAS
Durham, ... more Book Review of: 'The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder' by TULASI SRINIVAS Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2018
In this edited collection of papers, narratives and photo-documentation from research conducted u... more In this edited collection of papers, narratives and photo-documentation from research conducted under the Gender Network Project from 1999 to 2006, Kerala society is critiqued from feminist angles after removing the rose-tinted lenses of its internationally-acclaimed high literacy status. It provides a unique case study for the mixed blessings that achievement of statewide literacy brings to the women of this specific South Indian state, often used as a model-state for the attainment of basic human rights in international discourses on development, social welfare and justice. The all-Indian, mixed-gendered team of contributors to this volume come from a range of disciplines, including economics , development studies, psychoanalysis, rehabilitation psychology, history and photo journalism. The volume starts off with a chapter authored by the editor herself. She embarks on the counter-intuitive claim against the translation of high literacy rates among Kerala's women to a relatively high status. She thus critiques Kerala as a model state to mimic — in terms of the recorded high levels of gender development according to conventional indicators which is naively equated to a high standing of women. Such indicators include those found in economic surveys and census reports from the Government of India, Government of Kerala, and the United Nations Development Programme. The multi-dimension-ality of gender politics, such as gender-bias discourses, women's (re)productive labour not being recognised as work, and patriarchal attitudes and beliefs, among other things, required multiple modalities and methodologies. The researchers thus made methodologi-cal commitments to the immeasurable and unquantifiable by paying close attention to outliers generated by quantitative research projects and to qualitative data collected from detailed life histories, case studies and focus group discussions. Some notorious and noteworthy information shared about Kerala include having one of the top rates of recorded crimes against women, having one of the highest incidences of domestic violence, increasing proof of female foeticide, and some of the lowest female force participation rates. Rich qualitative interviews with women across various castes, class and contexts uncovered a lack of liberties one would tend not to associate with possessing literacy. Conventional indicators seem to sanitise for the benefit of the public, national and international gaze the obvious gendered disparities in the everyday lives of women of the region. The quest to decode this riddle of the state's excelling under general gender development indicators, while also showing distressing signs of women's oppression , drives the momentum of this book forward. Mukhopadhyay historically and sociologically removes the anchors that hold and perpetuate the popular belief in the 'positive' stereotype of the Malayalee matriarch. This conventional knowledge she describes has been born out of the high status accorded to women in matrilineal systems prevalent in some parts, the historical emphasis that social reformers have placed on women within the reform process, the early outreach of female education, family planning and communism. While conventional health and literacy indicators were thus relatively superior to other Indian states, recent falling sex ratios and rising dowry rates have yet to put a damper on public discernment sustained largely through a politics of distraction.
Immigrant and migrant parenting from and within Asia is a surprisingly understudied topic. This is despite intraregional migration (the median age of migrants in Asia is 35) being the dominant form of migration here. This workshop brings together scholars of Asian migration to consider what migrant parenting in Asia means for parents, families, and communities across old, new and/or multiple homes. We call for empirically grounded work which considers migrant parental care ranging from (but not limited to) classed, gendered and ethnicized parenting practices such as intensive parenting, remittance-sending and care-giving at a distance, food work, native language maintenance, culture work, and substitute care by relatives or fictive kin. By focusing on the emplaced, embodied, and gendered aspects of parenting, the workshop provides a finely grained lens to investigate intersectional agencies and subjectivities among migrant parents as well as the conjuncture between family and citizenship practices in superdiverse, multi-ethnic, Asian settings.
To address the overarching question of how migrant parenting is done in intra-Asia migration, workshop participants are invited to consider the following aspects of migrant parenting:
(1) the different migration policies which hinder and/or facilitate migrant parenting to be accomplished in multidimensional, unexpected, and creative ways. For example, how migrant parenting may be achieved despite uncaring migration regimes particularly for labour migrants implicated in global care chains.
(2) the kinds of migration (circular/circuit migration, stepwise migration) within Asia which engender variant forms of parental care enmeshed with ideological ‘Asian Values’ (e.g. stigmatized versus idealized parenting styles, the racialization of migrant parenting and hierarchies of destinations sites for parents)
(3) advancing conceptualizations of affective citizenship practices conducted via the work of migrant parenting in Asia (e.g. emotions, generational transnationalisms, aspirations for ‘worlding’ children through migration, ICT use among migrant parents)
(4) eliciting connections and comparisons on continental migrant parenting across Asia to wider theoretical applicability beyond Asian cases.
Part of “Asian Migrations In Covid-19 Times” Webinar Series with speakers Dr Paul Pronyk (UNICEF ... more Part of “Asian Migrations In Covid-19 Times” Webinar Series with speakers Dr Paul Pronyk (UNICEF Indonesia) and Dr David Dawe (FAO Thailand).
Asst Professor Arunima Datta’s (Idaho State University) recent book takes readers on a journey in... more Asst Professor Arunima Datta’s (Idaho State University) recent book takes readers on a journey into the lives of coolie women who left British South India for British Malaya from the late 1800s – early 1900s to labour in the empire’s rubber plantations. 'Fleeting Agencies' is an important ground-up history and critical interrogation of the impacts of structural violence cultivated under colonialism. Dr Datta’s scholarship foregrounds the extraordinary courage and agency of coolie women, men and families who sought to improve their situations away from home and create better lives for themselves and those around them. https://ari.nus.edu.sg/ariscope/author-interview-q-a-with-dr-arunima-datta-on-fleeting-agencies-a-social-history-of-indian-coolie-women-in-british-malaya/
In this photo-essay I curate and collage a visual narrative based on my experiences walking aroun... more In this photo-essay I curate and collage a visual narrative based on my experiences walking around religious sites... By ‘walking through social research’ (Bates & Rhys-Taylor 2017) and using pedestrian phone-photography, I initially set out to observe eight local sites of worship, from the outside, amidst the current pandemic context in which many of these spaces remain closed. Unexpectedly, however, I chanced upon some other religious sites which, until now, I had not been aware of and which I have included here. What unfolds is a reimagining of urban, public, performative modes of religion. More ‘mediatization’ (Couldry 2008) through online (social) media occurs by present necessity. I ponder how religion is accessed and consumed as an individual, household and community during the current pandemic context... Defensive and hostile ‘architecture’ of cordon tape and padlocks around sites of spiritual salve, transcendence and inclusion can create cognitive dissonance, a counter-intuitive affront. Bolted gates on beloved and significant landmarks are affectively jarring, and unlikely to be forgotten soon. Perhaps, however, these barricades can paradoxically become graphic reminders of civic responsibility – cementing community trust via sacrifice in the interest of public health during the ‘circuit-breaker’, phased re-openings and beyond... Perceptibly, I consider the idea of the entrance to religious space – “The threshold that separates the two spaces also indicates the distance between two modes of being, the profane and the religious. The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds – and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible” (Eliade 1959: 25). https://ari.nus.edu.sg/20331-34/
Family or parental migration projects are often conducted for the sake of the children, to enable... more Family or parental migration projects are often conducted for the sake of the children, to enable better futures under harsh economic circumstances. Drawing upon qualitative interviews from the Child Health and Migrant Parents in Southeast Asia (CHAMPSEA) Wave 2 project – where migration’s impact on the children, spouses and families left-behind (as a result of one or both parental migration) is explored more broadly – here we focus on investigating recalibrated, gendered carework and envisioned futures for migration or staying from the perspective of left-behind young women. Fieldwork was conducted in two rural migrant-sending villages in East Java, Indonesia. Lived experiences of left-behindness are studied to understand how this might affect pursuits of alternative livelihoods within cultures of migration. Freedoms, constraints, ambitions, and the distinctions between caring about from a distance, and everyday embodied, caring for is investigated from the perspectives of migrants’ children and their carers.
Short write up on the research forum 'Meeting Migrants’ Needs: Sharing Knowledge from Research an... more Short write up on the research forum 'Meeting Migrants’ Needs: Sharing Knowledge from Research and Practice' held on the 15th of September 2018.
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https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2021.1952170
Collaboration in qualitative research is increasingly encouraged and rewarded in many national and global funding schemes. Collaboration by scholars in (radically) different disciplines using different methods is becoming common, however less attention is given to collaboration using shared approaches across closely-related disciplines. This paper considers the ethnographic insights of four researchers from different (but related) disciplinary backgrounds who conducted collaborative fieldwork in one site-West Coast Park (WCP) in Singapore-over two periods of fieldwork. We conducted an experimental collaboration to study emotions, affect and mundane space through sharing and comparing our interpretations of everyday life in WCP. We ask, how do researchers capture or speak to the affective properties circulated during collaboration? Second, how should researchers approach the affective properties of mundane activities in space? Our paper develops a four-fold 'affective inventory' consisting of: a) multiple-attunements to the (un)familiar; b) attentiveness to affective affordances and their governing effects; c) attentiveness to involuntary affective charges, and; d) awareness of how our diverse affective biographies affect the (im)perceptibility of affect. We propose that such an inventory functions as a valuable guidepost in navigating collaborative ethnographies, especially when exploring emotions and affect.
among Coorg women (Kodavathees) are negotiated. The diasporic Kodavathees have found innovative ways to maintain their ‘religious’ practices and assert their distinct ethnic identity in Singapore, where being Hindu is often narrowly defined by broad social acceptance of the
official ethnic taxonomies of the state.
'The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder' by TULASI SRINIVAS
Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2021.1952170
Collaboration in qualitative research is increasingly encouraged and rewarded in many national and global funding schemes. Collaboration by scholars in (radically) different disciplines using different methods is becoming common, however less attention is given to collaboration using shared approaches across closely-related disciplines. This paper considers the ethnographic insights of four researchers from different (but related) disciplinary backgrounds who conducted collaborative fieldwork in one site-West Coast Park (WCP) in Singapore-over two periods of fieldwork. We conducted an experimental collaboration to study emotions, affect and mundane space through sharing and comparing our interpretations of everyday life in WCP. We ask, how do researchers capture or speak to the affective properties circulated during collaboration? Second, how should researchers approach the affective properties of mundane activities in space? Our paper develops a four-fold 'affective inventory' consisting of: a) multiple-attunements to the (un)familiar; b) attentiveness to affective affordances and their governing effects; c) attentiveness to involuntary affective charges, and; d) awareness of how our diverse affective biographies affect the (im)perceptibility of affect. We propose that such an inventory functions as a valuable guidepost in navigating collaborative ethnographies, especially when exploring emotions and affect.
among Coorg women (Kodavathees) are negotiated. The diasporic Kodavathees have found innovative ways to maintain their ‘religious’ practices and assert their distinct ethnic identity in Singapore, where being Hindu is often narrowly defined by broad social acceptance of the
official ethnic taxonomies of the state.
'The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder' by TULASI SRINIVAS
Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2018
Immigrant and migrant parenting from and within Asia is a surprisingly understudied topic. This is despite intraregional migration (the median age of migrants in Asia is 35) being the dominant form of migration here. This workshop brings together scholars of Asian migration to consider what migrant parenting in Asia means for parents, families, and communities across old, new and/or multiple homes. We call for empirically grounded work which considers migrant parental care ranging from (but not limited to) classed, gendered and ethnicized parenting practices such as intensive parenting, remittance-sending and care-giving at a distance, food work, native language maintenance, culture work, and substitute care by relatives or fictive kin. By focusing on the emplaced, embodied, and gendered aspects of parenting, the workshop provides a finely grained lens to investigate intersectional agencies and subjectivities among migrant parents as well as the conjuncture between family and citizenship practices in superdiverse, multi-ethnic, Asian settings.
To address the overarching question of how migrant parenting is done in intra-Asia migration, workshop participants are invited to consider the following aspects of migrant parenting:
(1) the different migration policies which hinder and/or facilitate migrant parenting to be accomplished in multidimensional, unexpected, and creative ways. For example, how migrant parenting may be achieved despite uncaring migration regimes particularly for labour migrants implicated in global care chains.
(2) the kinds of migration (circular/circuit migration, stepwise migration) within Asia which engender variant forms of parental care enmeshed with ideological ‘Asian Values’ (e.g. stigmatized versus idealized parenting styles, the racialization of migrant parenting and hierarchies of destinations sites for parents)
(3) advancing conceptualizations of affective citizenship practices conducted via the work of migrant parenting in Asia (e.g. emotions, generational transnationalisms, aspirations for ‘worlding’ children through migration, ICT use among migrant parents)
(4) eliciting connections and comparisons on continental migrant parenting across Asia to wider theoretical applicability beyond Asian cases.
https://ari.nus.edu.sg/events/apmj-champsea-workshop/
https://ari.nus.edu.sg/ariscope/author-interview-q-a-with-dr-arunima-datta-on-fleeting-agencies-a-social-history-of-indian-coolie-women-in-british-malaya/
What unfolds is a reimagining of urban, public, performative modes of religion. More ‘mediatization’ (Couldry 2008) through online (social) media occurs by present necessity. I ponder how religion is accessed and consumed as an individual, household and community during the current pandemic context... Defensive and hostile ‘architecture’ of cordon tape and padlocks around sites of spiritual salve, transcendence and inclusion can create cognitive dissonance, a counter-intuitive affront. Bolted gates on beloved and significant landmarks are affectively jarring, and unlikely to be forgotten soon. Perhaps, however, these barricades can paradoxically become graphic reminders of civic responsibility – cementing community trust via sacrifice in the interest of public health during the ‘circuit-breaker’, phased re-openings and beyond... Perceptibly, I consider the idea of the entrance to religious space – “The threshold that separates the two spaces also indicates the distance between two modes of being, the profane and the religious. The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds – and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible” (Eliade 1959: 25).
https://ari.nus.edu.sg/20331-34/
perspective of left-behind young women. Fieldwork was conducted in two rural migrant-sending villages in East Java, Indonesia. Lived experiences of left-behindness are studied to understand how this might affect pursuits of alternative livelihoods within cultures of migration. Freedoms, constraints, ambitions, and the distinctions between caring about from a distance, and everyday embodied, caring for is investigated from the perspectives of migrants’ children and their carers.