De-exceptionalising the Domestic: methodological de-nationalism and domestic labour
Wednesday 2 October 13:00 until 15:00
Arts C333
Speaker: Prof. Bridget Anderson, Migration Mobilities, Bristol (Director)
Part of the series: Geography Research Seminars: Beyond the Fringe
Joint Event with the Ethnicity, Race and Diverse Societies Research Network
Abstract
The doing of domestic work reflects, reproduces and entrenches complex inequalities and social hierarchies, effectively making and re-shaping difference across different axes. Research has examined this difference making in terms of migration, race and gender, and in this presentation I will take difference making as a starting point to see how attention to how differences are made can help us find commonalities. I will start by consider immigration controls as difference making mechanisms, interacting with social ideas of race and nation; I will then consider the role of states in exceptionalising domestic work and taking it outside the labour market. I will then give some examples of how examining the mechanisms for institutionalising difference rather than naturalising difference can help us uncover important connections between different groups of migrants and between migrants and citizens that have the potential to be both analytically and politically productive. To illustrate this I will draw on a range of previous research but principally a project conducted for the ILO in 2016 on working conditions and attitudes towards migrant domestic workers in Thailand and Malaysia.
Chair: Prof. Michael Collyer
Convenor: Prof. Divya P. Tolia-Kelly
All welcome. Coffee, tea and cake is provided.
By: Martin Wingfield
Last updated: Friday, 13 September 2019