Back and forth with hopes and fears: Sri Lankan men's narratives on gender and mobility in transnational livelihoods

Although in the past Sri Lanka has had a higher number of women migrant workers, recent statistics show that the gap between the percentages of female and male migrants is decreasing. Since 2007, male migrants have outnumbered female migrants. The article explores how Sri Lankan men have responded to the increased economic needs of their families and lack of proper income-generating activities within the country by engaging in transnational livelihoods, as well as how their roles and identities are contested and negotiated through labour migration. The study is based on men's narratives on their reasons for migration and their experiences of transnational labour migration. The concepts of hope and life course are used to analyse the intertwined relationships of gender and mobility in transnational livelihoods. The author identifies that men's mobility is motivated by their hopes of fulfilling traditional gender norms as providers and protectors of their families in combination with their new identity as successful men. Further, the study provides evidence that men's mobility is not only gendered but also a repeated act during their life course. The study contributes to strengthen research on mobility and gender by adding men's perspectives on transnational labour migration.     

Refugees in the IT Sector: Young Syrians’ Economic Subjectivities and Familial Lives in Jordan

This article explores refugee economic subjectivity in the context of restrictive asylum policies and disrupted transnational family lives. Drawing on fieldwork with young Syrian refugees pursuing IT training in Jordan, I focus on the “coding boot camp,” an emerging educational format in the field of refugee professional training. I thus explore how Syrian youths approach humanitarian policies in which, in the absence of full social and economic rights for refugees, the question of livelihoods is addressed through the paradigms of self‐reliance, creativity, and innovation. Reframing the refugee from a “protected” to a “productive” subject, and offering individual solutions to a structural economic impasse, these policies produce tensions between individual responsibilities and more‐than‐individual relations and identifications—with families, religious identities, and national communities—that remain unresolved. The findings contribute to geographical scholarship on economic subjectivity, familial relations, and the migrant and refugee condition, while shedding light on some of the effects of the encounter between technology‐centred, neoliberal approaches to humanitarianism and restrictive migration regimes in responses to the Syrian displacement.     

Globalising Swedish countrysides? A relational approach to rural immigrant restaurateurs with refugee backgrounds

The main purpose of the article is to connect rural immigrants’ business ventures and development in Sweden to relational perspectives on their proximate and distant family and co-ethnic networks at structural and individual levels. Accordingly, the authors employ a relational approach and draw on in-depth interviews. In the context of urban–rural relationships’ meanings for the restaurateurs’ business benefits and constraints, they address two questions: (1) What does embeddedness in proximate and distant family and co-ethnic networks mean for the interviewed restaurateurs and for their businesses? and (2) How do previous and anticipated transitions in the restaurateurs’ families influence their business decisions and migration trajectories? The results suggest that the interviewees employed transnational dimensions in their social embeddedness and that they maintained material and emotional relationships with their countries of origin. This relational approach thus contributes to a better understanding of what the studied businesses mean for the entrepreneurs and the selected localities. The restaurateurs contribute to a globalisation of Swedish countrysides, but their socio-economic potential for countering rural depopulation in Sweden is not fully realised. Additionally, the study illuminates how individuals influence, and are influenced by, place-to-place mobilities on a daily basis and during their life course.     

Runaway Brides: Anxieties of Identity among Trafficked Filipina Entertainers in South Korea

Although the migration of Filipinas to the Republic of Korea has only a short history, some Filipinas have already begun to form incipient communities around the largest United States military bases there. These communities are formed by an increasing number of women who run away from the military camptown clubs where they work as entertainers, to marry or live in cohabitation/de facto relationships with the enlisted American army personnel (or GIs) whom they meet and develop relationships with while working as entertainers in the GI clubs. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with the women in one such camptown, this paper documents their experiences and the dynamics of their marriages as they attempt to negotiate their transition from “trafficked entertainers” to “runaway brides”. Their experiences illustrate the daily tribulations of women who wish to improve their prospects, or more ambitiously, transform their identity whilst abroad, by entering into marriages or similar arrangements, but who continue to be encumbered with the stigma attached to being trafficked entertainers. The discussion in this paper aims to contribute to the literature on Filipina migrants' anxieties about identity in the context of transnational migration.     

Migration and Development? The Gendered Costs of Migration on Mexico's Rural “Left Behind”

Governments, civil society, and policymakers assert the potential of international migration to foster development and alleviate poverty. Often such claims are rooted in macroscale geopolitical analyses of migration and development, which mask the localized, uneven, and embodied ways family members “left behind” bear the costs and subsidize the U.S./Mexico (inter)national integration project. Informed by feminist geopolitics, this article demonstrates how the left behind disproportionately bear the hidden costs of neoliberal restructuring and migration. We draw upon Mexican Migration Project (MMP) ethnosurvey data to frame the narratives of migrant family members left behind. Narratives were constructed through in‐depth interviews conducted in rural Veracruz. We conclude that in the absence of geographically specific examinations of the hidden costs associated with neoliberal development and migration it is possible that “migration for development” programs and policies may exacerbate inequities that will perpetuate migration and further weaken Mexican origin communities.     

Fluid Households,Complex Families: The Impacts of Children's Migration as a Response to HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa*

The fluidity of southern African families is related to a long history of internal and external migration. Currently, HIV/AIDS is having a dramatic impact on extended family structures, with the migration of individual members employed as a coping strategy. Children's migration is one aspect of this that is often distinct from that undertaken by other household members. This article is based on qualitative research conducted in Lesotho and Malawi with young migrants and the households that receive them. It examines the processes of fragmentation and re‐formation of households through the movements of children that are taking place in response to HIV/AIDS, and explores the impacts these processes have on young migrants and the households they join.     

Inhabiting the Imaginary: Factory Women at Home on Batam Island, Indonesia

Batam Island, Indonesia, located a short ferry ride away from Singapore, is a place where tourism and industry have been developed simultaneously and a border area where “developed” and “developing” nations meet. Government officials, investing international corporations and the “factory women” who work in the island's industrial estates arrive in Batam ‐ native to none of them ‐ with their own preconceptions and goals. When challenges not foreseen through master planning arise, the authorities cling ever more tightly to their physical and structural development model: the nearby city‐state of Singapore. Conversely, the factory workers who travel intranationally to work in this export processing zone (EPZ) find their objectives contested in the face of the Master Plan, corporate agendas and ethnic fusions characterising this transnational capitalist space. Entering into the homes of three groups of women migrants living and working in Batam, the relationship between the private realm that they inhabit and the social contexts in which they participate publicly is investigated. Some of the choices that women make at and about home are identified, and their ability to “micro‐resist” these external structures is explored. At home, the dynamic relationship between the Batam development project and the women's own hopes and visions of the place ‐ sometimes parallel and sometimes incongruous ‐ are revealed. As they experience life on Batam, their “social imaginaries” of it are shaped into various new realities, and their homes, removed from the confines of the factory floor, thus become spaces of release from these tensions.     

Transnational Migration and the Gender Politics of Scale: Indonesian Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia

Recent research has begun to explore the dynamics of transnational migration from a feminist perspective, and studies of migrant domestic workers have played a prominent role in pushing forward this work. Emerging simultaneously, but largely separately, are explicit debates within geography about the politics of scale, the social construction of scale, and the gender dimensions of scale. This article develops an analysis of the gender politics of the production of scale, specifically, the ‘transnationalisation’ of Indonesian activist approaches to overseas migrant domestic workers' issues. Based on fieldwork in an Indonesian community in West Java that has recently become a sending area for migrants to Saudi Arabia and interviews with activists representing Indonesian migrant women, the article examines the various gender‐specific ways in which migrant women's rights activists construct and deploy the scales of the body, the nation and the transnational. It argues that activist approaches to migrant domestic workers' rights and the ways in which activists mobilise migrant women's narratives represent sophisticated feminist theoretical approaches to scale. By identifying and exploring the scale theory embedded in activist strategies, the analysis highlights the imbrication of feminist theory with practice, and underscores activists' agency in producing the meanings of specific scales. In so doing, the article is aimed more broadly at elaborating the ambivalent relationship between feminist activism/theory and transnationalism.     

Fluid Households,Complex Families: The Impacts of Children's Migration as a Response to HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa*

Abstract

The fluidity of southern African families is related to a long history of internal and external migration. Currently, HIV/AIDS is having a dramatic impact on extended family structures, with the migration of individual members employed as a coping strategy. Children's migration is one aspect of this that is often distinct from that undertaken by other household members. This article is based on qualitative research conducted in Lesotho and Malawi with young migrants and the households that receive them. It examines the processes of fragmentation and re-formation of households through the movements of children that are taking place in response to HIV/AIDS, and explores the impacts these processes have on young migrants and the households they join.     

Marxism, Sarcasm, Ethnography: Geographical Fieldnotes from South India

This paper addresses questions of ethnography in geographic fieldwork through research conducted on globalisation and work in Tiruppur, an industrial boomtown in South India. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tiruppur town in western Tamilnad State became India's centrepiece in the export of garments made of knitted cloth. This industrial boom has been organised through networks of small firms integrated through intricate subcontracting arrangements controlled by local capital of Gounders from modest agrarian and working‐class origins. In effect, the whole town works like a decentralised factory for the global economy, but with local capital of peasant‐worker origins at the helm. My research explores the historical geographic trajectories linking agrarian and industrial work, and the ways in which these histories are used in the present. In these uses of the past in remaking self and place, I interrogate the self‐presentations of Tiruppur's entrepreneurs, as these “self‐made men” hinge their retrospective narratives of class mobility and industrial success on their propensity to “toil”. This paper explores questions of ethnographic method emerging from a political‐economic context in which globalisation has worked by turning “toil” into capital.     

Vulnerability of families and households to natural hazards: A case study of storm surge flooding in Sarasota County,Florida

The role that family and household structure, size, and ethnic/racial composition play in increasing or decreasing vulnerability to natural hazards, which has been missing from the literature, is investigated. The study first reviews the conceptual foundations of the relationships between families/households and natural hazards vulnerability and then employs a principal components analysis to uncover spatial variations in the vulnerability of families and households to hurricane storm surge hazards in Sarasota County, Florida. The analysis identifies and maps five principal components that explain approximately 83% of the variance in family/household population: nuclear families/households; Black families/households; nonfamily, young adult group households; Hispanic families/households; and Asian families/households. Comparison of storm surge risk maps with the locations of these families/households shows the relative vulnerability of each of these family/household categories, with elderly householders living alone on exposed barrier islands being the most vulnerable. The research suggests that family and household structures integrate several socio-demographic vulnerability indicators central to most social vulnerability assessments. Results indicate that future research and hazard mitigation policies should focus on families and households as core analytical units. Findings also suggest that recognizing the diversity of families and households is important to reducing vulnerability to natural hazards.     

Seasonal Migrant Labor in the Forest Industry of the Southeastern United States: The Impact of H-2B Employment on Guatemalan Livelihoods

Migrant labor is a global phenomenon and remittances of migrant workers from non-industrial nations can play an important role in improving quality of life at family, community, and national levels. We focus on workers from Guatemala who obtain visas from the United States (US) Department of Immigration’s H-2B program that allow them to spend six or seven months a year planting and maintaining pine plantations in the southeastern US. Forestry is economically important in this region and the industry has come to depend on migrant labor. Our specific interest is how the H-2B program affects livelihood strategies of these workers, their families, and their communities. Based on primary data from 49 interviews conducted in eight Guatemalan communities, we explain motivations to engage in seasonal migration and positive changes brought about by the H-2B program in nutrition, housing, healthcare and long-term investments in agricultural lands, microenterprise development, education, and family stability.     

Gender and Migration Policies in Southeast and East Asia: Legal Protection and Sociocultural Empowerment of Unskilled Migrant Women

This paper is concerned with how existing migration policies affect individual migrant women's choices, in particular, with the advancement, or consolidation, of a migrants' rights perspective. The focus is thereby on those migrants classified as unskilled, who constitute the largest and most vulnerable category among migrants. The analysis of migration policies has conventionally been approached from a state/government‐centred viewpoint that sees states as the key actors. This paper, however, emphasises a larger number of actors ‐ governmental and non‐governmental ‐ as well as the power relations among them to argue that protection through “legal regulation” in the absence of actual implementation is an incomplete solution to alleviate unfair labour conditions that migrants in general, and migrant women specifically, experience. Measures designed to “protect” migrants must be accompanied by measures that empower them, a role that has largely been taken on by existing migrant worker non‐governmental organisations (NGOs). Focussing on intra‐Asian migration flows in which Southeast Asia is the main labour sender and East Asia the receiver of Southeast Asian migrants, the paper explores the nexus between law and civic activism in the specific subject area of international labour migration and its gender implications.     

Governing through mobilities and the expansion of spatial capability of Vietnamese marriage migrant activist women in South Korea

This paper revisits the debate on marriage migration by highlighting the role of governing power and individual response in the process of migration decision‐making and post‐settlement of Vietnamese marriage migrant activist women in South Korea. It contributes to current marriage migration debates by employing the lens of ‘governmobility’ and ‘spatial capability’. The research looks at how female migrant activists maneuver coercion, resistance, and activism, both governed by nation‐state politics, but also actively deciding their fate amidst pressures of the global marriage market. Based on in‐depth interviews with 21 Vietnamese marriage migrant women who have worked in mentoring, counselling and translating for other Vietnamese migrants, our findings demonstrate that marriage migrants are positioned in between two nation‐states whose perspectival focus is on relieving the tensions of their own domestic job and marital markets. At the same time, these women have broken free from the inertia of socio‐familial status quo and state intervention to become self‐governing agents of mobility in various stages of their migration and adaptation. Fueled on by their position as activists, the marriage migrants then expand their spatial capability to place‐making—shifting the notion of freedom from simply taking part in mobility to reshaping their locale.     

Spatial Patterns of Migration and Income Change in the Mountain West: The Dominance of Service‐Based,Amenity‐Rich Counties

One of the most recognizable and important changes occurring in the West is rapid population growth. This article intends to address questions associated with whether patterns of population growth and income migration are associated with “new” and “old” West economies. Rural restructuring in the U.S. has created a group of counties with service‐based economies. In the Mountain West, a number of counties with service‐based economies are located in areas with high levels of environmental or natural amenities, creating what has been termed the “New West.” Migration to the rural parts of the Mountain West, and the income transfers associated with migration, are increasingly concentrated within these New West counties. Rapid population growth, the changing characteristics of in‐migrants, and their spatial concentration in New West counties provide a basis for conflicts over what the rural West is becoming.     

Manoeuvring the middle ground: Social mobility and the renegotiation of gender and family obligations among Chinese Singaporeans

The article examines Singaporeans' experiences of upward social mobility and how traditional gender roles within the family are renegotiated and reinterpreted in Singapore. When the former British colony gained independence in 1965 its post-colonial government embarked on an ambitious modernization programme, under which villages were demolished and residents relocated to new high-rise estates, farmland gave way to factories, the education system was reformed, and women entered the workforce. The transformation has been accompanied by a rapid upward social mobility, whereby Singaporeans born in the midst of the transformation, in the period 1960s – 1980s, lived remarkably different lives compared with preceding generations. The article is an ethnographic analysis of how Singaporean middle-class women and men, who have experienced rapid upward social mobility, handle and negotiate changing expectations regarding gender and intergenerational support. The analytical framework is constructed around the concepts of social mobility, modernity, and spaces of contestation and negotiation. The ethnographic data illuminate how traditional family values, such as filial piety, are contested and renegotiated. The data also show how social mobility intersects with other forms of mobility, such as the spatial movement involved in urbanization. Women entering the labour force have to spend their days away from home and can no longer fully attend to their elderly family members and/or young children. However, spatial movement in the sense of increased access to transportation and communication has also enabled members of extended families to maintain their ‘urban kinship network’ without having to live together.     

女性跨国婚姻移民家空间的性别、资源与权力——粤西乡村案例

新文化地理学视角下的空间不仅具有物质属性,也是社会关系的容器。家庭常被置于社会学的论述范畴,同时,家庭也以空间形式出现,并表征着家庭成员间复杂、细微的权力结构。论文以广东罗定市华石镇中越跨国家庭的家空间为分析样本,以家庭资源中的经济资源、情感资源和社会资源为分析框架,并结合家空间的实用性、装饰性和防御性等特点,考察越籍妻子在家空间中的占用、功能划分与使用、美学装饰,以及日常空间实践中自我赋权的方式与机制。研究发现：① 为家庭提供主要经济收入的越籍妻子在夫妻权力结构中占有优势,在家空间的设置和安排中持有更多的话语权;② 越籍妻子将家空间视为自我情感与认同的表达渠道,通过装饰家居环境以建立起对家空间的控制;③ 由于社会资源的缺乏,越籍妻子在公共空间中受到排斥,家空间成为越籍妻子回避邻里交往的防御性堡垒。研究认为女性跨国婚姻移民在家空间中获得了施展个人权力的契机,但其权力仅限于家空间内,现阶段难以拓展至家以外的更大区域。研究结果既是对家的地理学中性别话题的补充,亦是对它的拓展与深化。     

Making migration meaningful: Achievements through separation in Mongolia

Mongolia has experienced two decades since the demise of the Soviet Union and has implemented strategies to strengthen its economy and its democratic practices. Transitions from being a nomadic society to a Soviet satellite state and onwards to liberal democracy have greatly impacted family life. The article focuses on changing patterns of mobility in the Mongolian ‘age of the market’ and its effects on population groups. Internal and international migration has continually risen as individuals and families have moved to places of opportunity. Connections are believed to be maintained during periods of absence by migrant family members, as both men and women are culturally permitted to be separate from their families. Migration is understood to contribute to prosperity, and separations contribute to generate growth and hishig (good fortune) for the good of the family. However, such mobility is also a way to escape family patriarchy and conformity, and can contribute to loss, hardship, and uncertainty for family members left behind. Further, mobility provides opportunities and a means to escape the stigma of ‘laziness’ culturally associated with poverty and immobility. Postsocialist separation has inadvertently contributed to the breakdown of the institutions of marriage and family – institutions that were supported by separations in the pastoral economy.     

UPROOTED LIVES: GENDER, VIOLENCE AND DISPLACEMENT IN COLOMBIA

During the last decade, more than 600,000 people have been forced to leave rural areas and migrate to regional urban centres in Colombia as a result of political violence in which guerrilla and paramilitary groups and the armed forces are the principal actors. The number of displaced people is still increasing. Nearly 60 per cent of them are women, and at least 25 per cent of the displaced households are headed by women, most of whom are widows. Focusing on three regions of the country - the northern Caribbean Coast, the central Middle Magdalena region and the Eastern Plains - the effects of forced displacement on women and men are analysed in terms of intra-household relationships, survival strategies and gender identities. The paper evaluates the gains and losses for women and men in the process of displacement. It argues that displacement has the strongest impact on women during the stage of “destruction”, while men, confronted with unemployment and loss of identity, are most affected during the stage of “reconstruction”.     

Spatial analyses of factors affecting household structure in Chinese cities: The case of three-generation lineal households

Household structure is an important aspect of family change during China’s modernization process. Existing literature has demonstrated significant associations between various factors and household structure, but the spatial variation in these relationships has not been examined. Using the 2010 Chinese population census data and geographically weighted regression (GWR) model, this study explored the spatial patterns of three-generation lineal households, a functionally important household type in China, and its influencing factors. There was significant heterogeneity in the distribution of three-generation lineal households. Socioeconomic, demographic, and cultural factors were all significantly related to the proportion of three-generation lineal households, but the relationships are place-specific in terms of direction and magnitude. These results suggest that the distribution of Chinese household structures cannot be explained by a single framework of family modernization theory but is determined by the interplay of various local characteristics. Especially, population migration plays an equally important role in affecting household structure than socioeconomic development in China. This work contributes to the family literature by highlighting the spatial heterogeneity in the impact of varying factors on household structure. Beyond the classic modernization theory, it sets a contextualized framework for understanding how Chinese household change in response to the rapid social transformation.