Gender, International Migration and Social Reproduction: Implications for Theory, Policy, Research and Networking

1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thanh-Dam Truong

This paper aims to contribute to the development of an analytical framework that provides the space for the understanding of female migrants as reproductive workers in a cross-national transfer of labor. It will first provide some hypothetical guidelines for the explanation of female migration in the context of reproductive labor. Based on accessible data, a discussion on the case of Japan will be presented to highlight the main issues and problems concerning female migrants as reproductive workers. Finally, implications on policy-making and networking at the international and national level will be analyzed and discussed, taking into account the specific ideological, political and socio-economic constraints.

2020 ◽  
pp. 239965442096523
Author(s):  
Thomas Borén ◽  
Patrycja Grzyś ◽  
Craig Young

This paper develops perspectives which seek to spatialize authoritarian neoliberalism through arguing for greater engagement with the politics of urban cultural policy formation in the neglected context of post-socialist East and Central Europe. Through analyzing the politics of urban cultural policy-making in Gdańsk, Poland, the paper spatializes authoritarian neoliberalism by exploring how relations between the urban and the national, and between the urban and the supranational, shape urban cultural policy, drawing upon literatures on political economy, policy mobilities, cultural policy research, and the concepts of authoritarian neoliberalism and the relational-territorial nexus. Gdańsk is a liberally run city, strongly aligned with the European Union (EU), opposed to the authoritarian neoliberal national level politics in Poland. The paper analyses urban-national tensions and relationships between Gdańsk and the EU to unpack the contested spatial nature of authoritarian neoliberalism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-68
Author(s):  
Ingrid Palmary ◽  
Thea de Gruchy

This article was prompted by emerging and highly politicised debates in South Africa over the role of ‘foreign influence’ in policy-making. Whilst popular debates on this issue are often over simplified, it nevertheless seemed a relevant topic for migration policy-making given its cross-national focus. In this article, we therefore consider what influenced the development of South Africa’s 2013 Prevention and Combatting of Trafficking in Persons Act (TiP Act) as just one example of migration policy-making. Using qualitative methods, we map the influences on the South African TiP Act, and highlight how these shaped the passing of the Act, as well as the form that it took. We describe three pathways of international influence that shaped and constrained the possibilities for the Act: the global system for the governance of trafficking, the globalisation of knowledge around trafficking, and the nature of diplomatic relations. Exploring these pathways, we interrogate and unpack the idea that policy-making takes place in isolation and exclusively at a national level. Instead, this article illustrates how policy-making around issues of trafficking, and migration, takes place amidst complex and unequal global relationships.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Ruth Gamburd

Physical and symbolic aspects of bodies limit the migration trajectories of female domestic workers from a Buddhist community in coastal Sri Lanka. Government regulations and family decisions regarding women’s overseas labour draw upon and in turn influence discourses about gender, sexuality, age, health, and class. This ethnographic analysis illustrates that local norms task women with nurturing the brains of babies, preserving the chastity of teenage daughters, caring for frail elders, and preventing their working-class husbands from overindulging in liquor or having sex with other women. Successful social reproduction depends on the proper conjunctions of bodies in the extended family. Corporeal and symbolic dangers imagined to arise from women’s absence fuel a national-level moral panic about female migration.


Author(s):  
Smriti Rao ◽  
Vamsi Vakulabharanam

Since liberalization, urban migration in India has increased in quantity, but also changed in quality, with permanent marriage migration and temporary, circular employment migration rising, even as permanent economic migration remains stagnant. This chapter understands internal migration in India to be a reordering of productive and reproductive labor that signifies a deep transformation of society. The chapter argues that this transformation is a response to three overlapping crises: an agrarian crisis, an employment crisis, and a crisis of social reproduction. These are not crises for capitalist accumulation, which they enable. Rather, they make it impossible for a majority of Indians to achieve stable, rooted livelihoods.


Author(s):  
Cathie Martin ◽  
Tom Chevalier

Why did historical anti-poverty programs in Britain, Denmark and France differ so dramatically in their goals, beneficiaries and agents for addressing poverty? Different cultural views of poverty contributed to how policy makers envisioned anti-poverty reforms. Danish elites articulated social investments in peasants as necessary to economic growth, political stability and societal strength. British elites viewed the lower classes as a challenge to these goals. The French perceived the poor as an opportunity for Christian charity. Fiction writers are overlooked political agents who engage in policy struggles. Collectively, writers contribute to a country's distinctive ‘cultural constraint’, or symbols and narratives, which appears in the national-level aggregation of literature. To assess cross-national variations in cultural depictions of poverty, this article uses historical case studies and quantitative textual analyses of 562 British, 521 Danish and 498 French fictional works from 1770 to 1920.


1995 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 664-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Collins

This paper provides an analytical framework within which to understand the contrasting way farmers' interests are aggregated and articulated in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The analysis draws on the dominant European literature on state-farmer relations which emphasizes the role of policy networks and explores whether the concepts of pluralism or corporatism best characterize policy making in the two states.


2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ignacio Pisano ◽  
Mark Lubell

This article seeks to explain cross-national differences on environmental behavior. After controlling for a series of sociodemographic and psychosocial factors, it was predicted that national levels of wealth, postmaterialism, education development, and environmental problems are positively related to environmental behavior. The national-level variance is to a substantial degree explained by individual-level variables, capturing compositional effects. The remaining variance is explained by the contextual-level variables. All of the country-level variables are predictors in the expected direction, with the exception of environmental degradation, which is negatively related to behavior, and education development, which has no impact on private environmental behavior. More importantly, cross-level interactions show that in more developed countries, there are stronger relationships between proecological attitudes and reported proenvironmental behavior. These findings contribute to the growing cross-cultural research on environmental behavior pointing out the necessity of simultaneously assessing the effects of both individual and contextual-level forces affecting behavior across nations.


Author(s):  
Elliot B. Weininger ◽  
Annette Lareau

Decades after the publication of his key works, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of education remains the object of persistent misunderstanding. A coherent account of this work must distinguish, at minimum, two phases to Bourdieu’s thoughts on education. During the early period, Bourdieu asserted the salience of both self-selection and institutional selection in shunting students into class destinations that echoed their class origins. However, these works were uniformly devoted to identifying the peculiarities of the (then) contemporary French system, considered to be an exemplar of a distinct (“traditionalistic”) institutional form. In contrast, Bourdieu’s later work sought to develop a model of the relation between education and social inequality that had significant cross-national scope. This work de-emphasized the role of self-selection, and developed a substantially more nuanced account of the relation between education and social mobility. What Bourdieu terms the “scholastic mode of reproduction” in this period denotes a system in which children from the upper reaches of the class structure are systematically advantaged in the pursuit of social rewards by virtue of their inherited cultural capital, yet nevertheless face a real risk of downward mobility. For this reason, we term it a theory of “imperfect social reproduction.”


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 4042 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Wei ◽  
Yuanjun Zhu ◽  
Hao Li ◽  
Kebin Zhang ◽  
Baitian Wang ◽  
...  

The abandonment and cultivation of croplands in the Eurasian Steppe has become the focus of global and regional food security and agricultural policy-making. A large area of cropland in some post-Soviet countries has proven to be abandoned with the disintegration of the Soviet Union; however, it is unclear as to whether Kazakhstan also experienced a similar change as one of the main food providers for the former Soviet Union. In this study, we used the annual land cover dataset (1992–2015) from the European Space Agency, Climate Change Initiative (ESA-CCI) to detect spatio-temporal characteristics of rainfed and irrigated cropland changes in Kazakhstan. The Mann–Kendall test and regime shift analysis showed that rainfed and irrigated cropland at national level had a significant increasing trend with a significant rising up to 1999 and stagnation during 2000–2015, which was further confirmed with analysis at 14 regions. The greatest contributor to rainfed and irrigated croplands was steppes, followed by shrinkage of water bodies since 2005 to a great extent, rapid urbanization process resulted in losses of a part of irrigated oases. The trend surface analysis indicated that reorganized stable pattern characterized by rainfed cropland in north and irrigated cropland in south was driven by the strategy of the gradual agricultural development of oases. The nonexistence of cycle between the abandonment and recultivation proved that newly-gained cropland from steppe may be less degraded and more productive for sustainable land use in Kazakhstan. In conclusion, this study can provide strong evidence for sustainable land use and a basis for food security policy-making in Kazakhstan, and even all of the Central Asian countries in the future.


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