Theme

Asian Migrations

The theme of Asian migrations, in the broadest sense, touches upon a wide array of practices, social issues and configurations of power.

The mobility and influence of Asian peoples and productions have been a driving force in reshaping landscapes and relationships from ancient to modern times, from historical trade networks that made European colonial empires possible; to
the circulation of goods, images and technologies and their unexpected global trajectories; to the concept of urbanization being redefined by processes emerging from the ‘Global South’.

What are the roles of Asian communities, resources, and ideas in the emergence of global forms and how do their flows constitute and transform specific worlds?

In order to gain a nuanced understanding of Asia’s role in the transformation of the global, the workshop and conference will focus on exploring the social, historical, political and economic conditions that give rise to particular forms of Asian migration, and the diverse impacts they have in various local and global arenas. We will specifically focus on how particular networks or assemblages of people and things transform social worlds and relationships.

The key themes related to Asian migrations include but are not limited to:

Rethinking categories of migration

• Problematizing scale: the internal vs. international migration divide and bridging the gap
• From brain drain to brain circulation? Highly-skilled migrants and students
• The politics of terminology: subject-making and the production of difference through categories (e.g., tourists, settlers, unskilled labourers, seasonal migrants, expats, nomads, pilgrims, slaves, natives, citizens, etc)
• Making place: migration flows, network ontologies and emerging concepts of place

The politics of recognition: cities, states, migrants and membership

• National imaginaries, autochthony and migrant communities
• Internal migration and urbanization: perspectives from East Asia and the Global South (rural-urban migrants; floating populations; informal networks)
• Citizenship and belonging
• Human rights and the migrant
• Moralities of migration – socially constructed values and codes of conduct of migrants and their communities
• Historical and contemporary shifts in state immigration policies

Economies of mobility and connectivity

• The effects of Asian migrations on global and local economies
• Processes of intra-Asian colonization and urbanization
• Global dimensions of Asian labour
• Capitalizing Diasporas (extensions of the state through community; capital and expertise building overseas; overseas citizenship)
• Infrastructures of Migration (distribution of natural resources (oil, water, electricity); the socioeconomics of trans-border materialities (e.g. walls, railways, oceans, migration routes)
• Vulnerabilities of age and gender – global and trans-border economies of exploitation

Cultures of displacement

• Forced displacement: Disaster, Development, War and Partition
• Memory and displacement: hidden histories and silenced pasts/Migrant roots and modes of belonging
• Legacies of Colonial and State practices of migration (building states/states of non-citizenship)
• Circulations of labour: new socialities of highly-skilled to low-skilled migrants (conceptions of home, community, identity and belonging)

The making and unmaking of borders

• States of insecurity: fences, wall and borders and their social, legal, economic and material impacts
• Illicit flows: human trafficking, drugs and contraband, terrorism
• Passenger mobilities:  travellers and traffic (Tourist economies of nature, culture, sex; nomads)
• Invisible borders and Border-crossings
• Cultures in Contact: Assimilation, friction and hybridity