Super-diversity and the bio-politics of migrant worker exclusion in Singapore

Goh, Daniel P. S.

doi:10.1080/1070289x.2018.1530899

Cited by 21 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…More broadly, migrant workers in hostels typically experience ‘social quarantining’ where they are dislocated from their families and excluded or marginalized from local communities (Azmeh, 2014; Goh, 2019; Horgan and Liinamaa, 2017). Thus, ‘relationships in both their work and home environments are heavily circumscribed: they have no control over who they interact with in work situations or with whom they live’ (Horgan and Liinamaa, 2017: 724).…”

Section: Worker Hostels In Global Supply Chainsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hybrid (un)freedom in worker hostels in garment supply chains

et al. 2022

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Worker hostels or dormitories are common in labour-intensive industries staffed largely by migrant labour and have long been associated with exploitative practices. More recently, hostels have come under scrutiny due to accusations that they are used to restrict workers’ freedom in ways that are tantamount to modern slavery. Drawing on a qualitative study of a garment hub in South India where such claims have frequently arisen, we explore the conditions of freedom and unfreedom in worker hostels and how suppliers who run such hostels respond to competing expectations about worker freedom. Our findings show that hostels perform three interrelated functions: restriction, protection, and liberation, which together constitute a complex mix of freedom and unfreedom for migrant women workers that we term hybrid (un)freedom. As a result, we problematise the binary understandings of freedom and unfreedom that predominate in the modern slavery literature. We also develop a new way forward for examining freedom in the context of hostels that considers the system of relationships, traditions, and socio-economic arrangements that workers and employers are locked into and which prevent meaningful improvements in the freedom of women workers.

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Section: Worker Hostels In Global Supply Chainsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hybrid (un)freedom in worker hostels in garment supply chains

et al. 2022

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“…There are multiple modes of negotiating, advocating, experiencing and producing different forms of diversity that are contingent upon historical and geographical circumstances. There is, indeed, a need to “moor” analyses of superdiversity as Goh (2019) argued. During COVID‐19, this moor‐ing exceeds the simple grafting of diversification onto the changing context of a city whose diversification is composed of differentiated new arrivals.…”

Section: Understanding Migrant‐driven Diversification Through Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Ordering Diversity: Co‐Producing the Pandemic and the Migrant in Singapore during COVID‐19

2021

Antipode

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What do measures of management during this exceptional and volatile time tell us about the regulation of migrant‐driven diversity and its implications in the arrival city? Using the term “differential diversification” from Singapore, I examine how the socio‐political life of the pandemic is deeply entangled with the management of low‐waged labour migrants. Techno‐political discourses and practices of pandemic management accelerated the state’s attempts to differently include migrant workers, revealing the bare viscerality of biopolitics already in place prior to the pandemic. I argue that diversity is ordered through a striking co‐production of migrant management and pandemic management. This paper draws upon government discourses to demonstrate that measures of pandemic management contribute not only to the spatial regime of migrant management. They also articulate and rationalise the subject transformation of the low‐waged migrant to the extent that, on top of being a moral risk, they are also now a medical risk.

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“…Focusing on the politics of non‐integration and separateness enacted through social and spatial strategies of control and containment has sharpened a different analytical lens to understanding the complex relationship between migration, diversity and (non‐)integration (Yeoh, 2018). Another important strand of the literature attends to how migrant claims‐making in the broader pursuit of dignity, security and mobility is enacted and challenged in the warp and woof of everyday life, not so much in the domain of legal citizenship, but through the prism of on‐the‐ground struggles over labour processes, civil society and community mobilisation, and the construction of symbolic boundaries separating citizens who belong from migrants who are disposable (Goh, 2019; Loong, 2018).…”

Section: Postcolonial Nation‐building and Temporary Migrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptual contours of migration studies in and from Asia

Yeoh

2021

International Migration

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Over the last six decades, Asia's participation in population mobility on the global stage has advanced in unprecedented ways. Today, Asia sustains two-thirds of the world's population and is the origin of 40 per cent of the world's international migrants (IOM, 2019). Intraregional migration has grown rapidly and accounts for more than half of Asian migrants on the move (66 million), while extra-regional migrants number around 44.6 million (IOM, 2019: 68). A vast region of great complexity and enormous diversity, Asia's massive social transformation, economic development and demographic change are inextricably linked to new understandings and practices centring migration as a social force for change. Accompanying the rise of migration in Asia as a vital transformative force, migration research in the Asian context has not only grown in volume and substance, but also carved out its own distinctive contours in response to the lived reality of a dynamic region. This is a shifting kaleidoscopic region grappling with a shared history of colonialism and postcolonial nation-building, and at the same time riven by the incommensurability of immense socio-economic inequality, deep-seated cultural difference and wide divergence in political regimes.Against such variance and variegations in the region, summarising even the key developments in migration research in Asia would take much more than a short commentary. Instead, my task is much more focused on spotlighting distinctive contributions illustrating how an empirical concentration on Asia has organically advanced conceptual understandings in the field of international migration. This task is not inspired by strains of Asian exceptionalism but more akin to Chen's (2010: 212) "Asia as method," where anchoring research in Asia practically and imaginatively creates "each other's points of reference, so that … the diverse historical experiences and rich social practices of Asia may be mobilised to provide alternative horizons and perspectives." As a small and tentative step towards materialising the postcolonial desire to "theorise from the South, rather than just use the SouthThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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Super-diversity and the bio-politics of migrant worker exclusion in Singapore

Cited by 21 publications

References 17 publications

Hybrid (un)freedom in worker hostels in garment supply chains

Hybrid (un)freedom in worker hostels in garment supply chains

Ordering Diversity: Co‐Producing the Pandemic and the Migrant in Singapore during COVID‐19

Conceptual contours of migration studies in and from Asia

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