Suchergebnisse

Within the scholarship on precarity, low-waged contract-based migrants are recognized as centrally implicated in precarious employment conditions at the bottom of neoliberal capitalist labor markets. Precarity as a socially corrosive condition stems from both the multiple insecurities of the workplace as disposable labor, and a sense of deportability as migrant subjects with marginal socio-legal status in the host society. Our study of Bangladeshi construction workers in Singapore contributes to refining understandings of precarity by approaching labor migration as a cumulative, intensively mediated process, whereby risks and vulnerabilities are compounded across different sites in migrants' trajectories, even as they enact themselves as mobile, aspiring subjects. As a condition-in-the-making, precarity is experienced and compounded, through a continuum beginning in pre-migration indebtedness, multiplying through entanglements with the migration industry, and manifesting in workplace vulnerabilities at destination. It is most finely balanced when predictability and planning yield to arbitrary hope.

This special issue develops brokerage as a historically specific category of practice to investigate its intricate link in shaping and sustaining Asian migration infrastructures. To understand this specific interconnection, the authors focus their analytical lenses on the emergence and functioning of migration infrastructures in the particular socio-cultural contexts of Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea. Reflecting the "Asian infrastructural turn," the collection examines diverse infrastructural forms, processes, and potentials embedded in, and in turn productive of, a range of brokerage activities, objects, institutions, and actors. Inspired by the ongoing methodological attention to the "migrant-broker" category, our ethnographic cases illuminate in various ways the specific social histories and political processes on which understandings of brokerage are based, and account for the different ways brokerage practices materialize across Asia. Of particular interest is the contingent social worlds of brokerage as they unfold in the everyday—through indeterminacy, unstable relational dynamics, institutional limits, and experimental possibilities—(re)organizing existing socio-cultural orders as well as convening infrastructural potentials. (Pac Aff/GIGA)

This paper interrogates the exclusionary politics of casino urbanism in Singapore, especially in terms of how this particular brand of urbanism reproduces disciplinary regimes through the uneven consumption of fun and leisure. Singapore's vision of becoming a world-class "state of fun" is accompanied by increasingly sophisticated measures of boundary making between global leisure citizens and the excluded others, often comprised of the working class and those deemed to be at risk or lacking self-control and responsibility. The evolving biopolitical borders coincide with the multiple borders set up around Singapore's casino spaces, ensuring the exclusive consumption of Singapore's casino urbanism by the wealthy few. The fun regimes help to normalize social exclusion, moralize disciplinary control, and give legitimacy to the new class of global consumers under the operations of the state-capital apparatus. This paper argues that exclusive casino urbanism has broader social and political implications on issues of equality, accessibility, and urban participation. (Pac Aff/GIGA)

In the past three decades, the bid to develop Singapore into a global hub for high-tech, knowledge-intensive industries has underpinned Singapore's push to augment its local talent pool by attracting highly skilled transnational migrants. The ensuing influx of "foreign talent" into the "nation-city-state" has triggered major questions relating to social integration and cohesion, and raised implications for Singapore's demographic future and its "multiracial" identity. The article seeks to understand the politics of identity stemming from the increased presence of highly skilled migrants. After reviewing conceptualizations of the globally mobile "international talent" and tracing the key changes in Singapore's immigration-cum-labor policies (particularly those relating to highly skilled migrants), the article examines the fraught terrain on which the "integration" of highly skilled immigrants is staged, giving attention to the social dynamics of interaction between "foreign talent" and the "Singapore core" (popular terms often used in the media), the ensuing identity politics of inclusion and exclusion, and the slippages between the closure associated with building a "nation-state" and the openness critical to "global city" ambitions.

Out of a total of 38 million people living with HIV/AIDS globally today, the Asia-Pacific is home to about 7.4 million - a figure which constitutes a sharp rise to previous years. In absolute numbers, infections in Asia are projected to exceed African figures within a decade. This has largely to do with economic changes towards market-based capitalism, widening socioeconomic disparities and increased levels of mobility (internal and cross-border), as for instance in China and Indonesia. Overall, the epidemic in Asia has been described as more complex than in Africa involving a multiplicity of transmission modes. The case studies presented in the contributions to this special issue discuss the connections between issues of mobility, gender, (trans)nationalism and sexuality in understanding the HIV/AIDS challenge in the region. The various ways in meeting the challenges of HIV/AIDS in Southeast and East Asia areanalysed, whereby non-governmental and community-based responses often emerge as more effective than state interventions.

Out of a total of 38 million people living with HIV/AIDS globally today, the Asia-Pacific is home to about 7.4 million - a figure which constitutes a sharp rise to previous years. In absolute numbers, infections in Asia are projected to exceed African figures within a decade. This has largely to do with economic changes towards market-based capitalism, widening socioeconomic disparities and increased levels of mobility (internal and cross-border), as for instance in China and Indonesia. Overall, the epidemic in Asia has been described as more complex than in Africa involving a multiplicity of transmission modes. The case studies presented in the contributions to this special issue discuss the connections between issues of mobility, gender, (trans)nationalism and sexuality in understanding the HIV/AIDS challenge in the region. The various ways in meeting the challenges of HIV/AIDS in Southeast and East Asia areanalysed, whereby non-governmental and community-based responses often emerge as more effective than state interventions.

This paper focuses on the pivotal role played by the state in refashioning the Chinatown landscape as part of both nation-building and heritage tourism projects, and the ensuing cultural politics. After a brief history of the creation of Singapore's Chinatown, the paper discusses, first, Chinatown's place in Singapore's post-independence nation-building project and, second, the reconfiguration of the Chinatown landscape as a tourism asset. The final section reflects on the changing politics of place as Chinatown gains legitimacy in state discourses on heritage, tourism and multiculturalism, as well as in the popular imagination as an ethnic precinct par excellence.