Seminar no. 1312
19 February 2025 Time: 15:00 – 16:00 hrs. (Special)
Speaker: Dr.Shahar Shoham (The Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany)
The gravity of sending communities into the lives, imaginaries, and future-oriented visions of migrants offers further paths for political struggles and knowledge production. Migrants’ homes are a leading force in the trajectories of mobile people who sell their labor. In capitalist, racialized, and discriminatory migration regimes, such as the one at the center of this research, homes are more than a physical place of origin. They encompass a multiplicity of relations, affective worlds, and power dynamics. They are spaces where responsibilities, a sense of belonging, and hopes materialize and negotiate.
This paper places migrants at the heart of studying a particular migration regime and adopts an actor centered approach to the translocal study of movement across borders and migration governance. The research is led by the gravity of the people from Ban Phak Khad, a sending migration village in the northeast region of Thailand, known as Isaan, and their experiences as migrant workers in Israel in the last four decades. The first group of migrants who worked in Israel at the end of the 1970s were hired by the US military. Since the late 1980s until today, people from Ban Phak Khad and other communities in Isaan have been migrating to Israel to work as temporary migrant farmworkers in the Israeli agriculture sector. The research is based on fieldwork in Thailand and Israel, archival research, and digital ethnography.
The paper argues that shifting the focus into sending communities open spaces and temporalities for the study of migration beyond the country of migration. It analyses how migrants from Isaan invest efforts, contextualized as the labor of social reproduction, to maintain the possibilities their home communities open to them as they move between labor markets.
While social reproduction of sending communities is embedded within capitalist labor relations and is part of its reproduction, it also holds possibilities for transforming the existing structures. Alternatively, it can set an agenda for research and practices that aim to contribute to such a change. As this paper demonstrates, moving around the orbit of a sending community lead to decentring the analysis of a migration regime and to shift between scales: the local scale in the country of origin, the governmental and institutional scale of the country of destination, the global geopolitical scale, and the migrants’ perspectives as actualizing through their labor agency, acts of resistance and creative cultural productions.
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