Making foreign women the mother of our nation: the exclusion and assimilation of immigrant women in Taiwan

Citizenship awarding is politicised. Conceiving female marriage migration as a national threat, Taiwan's citizenship legislation is consciously designed and purposefully utilised to achieve exclusion and assimilation. Driven by a nationalistic impetus, it shows how Taiwan imagines itself as a modern, prosperous and homogenous nation and projects upon the immigrant outsiders as a threat to its self-identity. Examined through immigrant women's lived experiences, this citizenship legislation is biased by gender, class and ethnicity. The implementation of the legislation is not only an example of symbolic politics but also banal nationalism realised at grassroots level in the private domain. Immigrant women's lived experiences show that exclusion and assimilation stemmed from banal nationalism is not just an operation of symbolic politics but is also enmeshed with their everyday life.     

民族社会学视野下的回族女性研究

回族女性研究是中国妇女研究的重要组成部分,20世纪90年代以来,中国回族女性研究取得了长足的进步和发展。本文着力于回顾既往回族女性研究中所涉及的诸多问题展开历史追溯与反思,就回族女性研究的内涵、研究的对象与范围、研究的意义与作用、研究的方法、理论构建、学术素养等学术界较为关注的几个问题进行了论述,在追溯中反思我们今后研究的拓展方向,力求为未来回族女性的发展提供一定参考。     

Competing for the diaspora's influence at home: party structure and transnational campaign activity in El Salvador

ABSTRACT

How do parties in migrant-sending countries engage with the diaspora? Migrants exercise an increasingly important voice in electoral politics in their home countries, though they often either cannot legally vote or vote in very low numbers, yet parties attempt to leverage the influence they believe migrants have over voters at home. However the degree and manner by which parties reach out to diaspora citizens varies widely. A case study of El Salvador points to party organisation as a determinant of variation among parties in diaspora campaigning, based on interviews with Salvadoran party elites in the U.S. and El Salvador, party documents, and historical comparison of campaign activities of El Salvador's two major parties, ARENA and FMLN, over three presidential elections and one mayoral election. FMLN, with a hierarchical model and base committee structure, more effectively mobilizes diaspora support while ARENA, with a horizontal model and sectoral structure, exhibits difficulties in party-diaspora coordination and largely makes indirect and symbolic references to diaspora issues.     

Oiling the wheels? Flexible labour markets and the migration industry

ABSTRACT

The growing commercialisation of migration, often through a multiplicity of labour market intermediaries, is an issue of increasing academic interest. We seek to contribute to an emerging research agenda on the migration industries by exploring how one of the key actors that constitutes it, recruitment agencies, sits at the nexus between flexible labour market structures and migrant labour. Interviews with U.K. labour providers and low-wage employers form the evidence base for an analysis of the strategies developed by recruiters to derive commercial gain from connecting the so-called ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ sides of the flexible international labour market. We seek to contribute to understandings of the analytical categories within migration systems by illustrating how the migration industry interacts with other key stakeholders to structure international migration.     

Migration decision-making and migration industry in the Indonesia–Malaysia corridor

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the involvement of migration industry (MI) in the migration system of Indonesia and Malaysia. The two countries share an extensive border and have much in common in culture and history but they are very different in geographical size, population and economic development, the latter being a main cause for labour migration from Indonesia to Malaysia. The changing context of government policies generates new niches for migration services taken up by formal and informal intermediaries, thereby confronting migrants with a varied migration-decision field and thresholds during their migration process. Much of the migration is legal, but a large part of it also takes place outside the control of the national governments. While taking mental processes in migration decision-making as starting point, we analyse how the MI, by way of fostering, facilitating and controlling geographic mobility and localised employment, connects to the production and negotiating of three migration decision thresholds faced by migrants.     

试析党项妇女的强悍之风

强悍是党项妇女的一种特殊风气,主要表现为她们喜好复仇、尚武参战、恣行攻掠、乐于参政、殉情现象等等。文章认为,党项妇女的强悍风谷是当时复杂的经济、政治等多种因素长期作用的产物,体现了古代西北社会强悍勇武的特有民风。     

Brushed aside: African American women’s narratives of hair bias in school

ABSTRACT

For African American women, hair is a key site of identity formation and self-esteem that has been largely ignored by education researchers. Fifty-six African American women shared memories of negative hair experiences in school as a means to magnify the implicit injuries of racial and gender marginalization in educational environments. Memories consisted of hair shaming and suffering the consequences of hair damage, by way of classmate or teacher. Embarrassment and anxiety were the most frequently reported emotional reaction, resulting in participants’ discomfort in school and in their interpersonal relationships. Findings from this study suggest that hair bias represents a source of trauma and identity negotiation within school contexts. Critical Black feminist theories were used to frame the method and interpretation of participants’ reflective narratives. The insights provided through the narrative sample fuel recommendations regarding anti-bias teaching and school policy reform.     

Not without them: realising the sustainable development goals for women migrant workers

ABSTRACT

Drawing on multiple data sources, including key informant interviews, participant observation and archival study, this paper provides an analysis of the civil society’s role in foregrounding the agenda of women migrants in migration and development (M&D) fora, and reflects on its role in realising the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet, the dominant narrative within the state-led Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) tends to be a gender-blind migration for development approach, which emphasises national-level economic growth at the centre of migration processes, while negating the subjectivities of women migrants and neglecting their contributions to the global economy; this approach diverts attention to a narrow focus on macro-economic development through forms of financial remittances. Based on an examination of the GFMD as a site for gender mainstreaming M&D, we reflect on lessons learned as we look forward to achieving the SDGs. We argue that while the SDGs include some significant provisions for women in migration, only critical civil society advocacy and activism networked within grassroots organisations can address the structural changes necessary (such as a re-articulation of the care economy to value economic contributions of women’s reproductive work) to transform and improve the lived realities of women in migration and realise the SDGs in a manner that fosters their empowerment.     

Navigating the migration industry: migrants moving through an African-European web of facilitation/control

ABSTRACT

This paper approaches the African-European migration industry as a complex web of relations in which different actors liaise, objectives oppose each other, and roles overlap. Starting from this notion, the question emerges: How do migrants navigate this fuzzy web of migration facilitation/control? To answer this question, this paper uses a ‘trajectory ethnography’ that follows the im/mobility processes of migrants from West – and Central Africa to, and inside, Europe. In so doing, it particularly focuses on two practices that are related to the concept of social navigation. First, it concerns débrouillardise, a term that points to the power of improvisation, creativity and hustling. Second, it regards social negotiation, a term referring to the process of how migrants ‘massage’ their relations with important actors in the field. The findings stress the relational dimension of the migration industry in the sense that the functioning of one actor depends so much on the intentions and efforts of others. I conclude that we could enhance our knowledge on migration industries with studies that constantly shift between the perspective of the migrant, the social network, the facilitator and controller. Such a dynamic approach unpacks further the multiple efforts that produce migrant im/mobility.     

藏、回、汉族女大学生自我意识的跨文化研究

研究结果表明 :各民族女大学生都有较高的自我意识发展水平 ,但还存在着种种民族差异。研究确证了文化是影响自我意识形成和发展的主要变量 ,具体包括民族文化、宗教信仰、价值观念和生态环境等因素。