Golay Lecture: Transnational Families and the Temporary Migration Regime in Southeast Asia

Brenda Yeoh (National University of Singapore) gives the 12th Frank H. Golay Memorial Lecture
Mark your calendars!
Tuesday, November 15, 2022 at 4:30pm to 6:00pm
Physical Sciences Building, 120 (245 East Avenue)
Light reception to immediately follow in PSB West Pavilion.
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 longitudinal research on Indonesian and Filipino rural households in migrant-sending villages, the presentation investigates the vital 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. 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 for understanding the sustainability of transnational families in the liminal times of migration.
Brenda S.A. Yeoh FBA is Raffles Professor of Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Research Leader of the Asian Migration Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. Professor Yeoh made important contributions to the field of migration and transnationalism studies and was awarded the Vautrin Lud Prize for outstanding achievements in Geography in 2021. Her work is distinctly Asia-focused while also significant for theory-building more generally. She is widely recognised for her research leadership in three areas: migration-led diversification, cosmopolitanism and spatial politics; human aspiration, care migration and social reproduction among migrant households in Southeast Asia; migration infrastructures and transnational mobility of migrant workers at various skill levels. She has published widely on these topics and her recent books include Handbook of Asian Migrations (Routledge, 2018 with Gracia Liu-Farrer); Student Mobilities and International Education in Asia: Emotional Geographies of Knowledge Spaces (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019 with R.K. Sidhu and K.C. Ho) and Handbook of Transnationalism (Edward Elgar, 2022 with F.L. Collins).