Migration Politics: Transnational Rights, Religion, and Labor in Indonesia

Rachel Silvey, University of Toronto

My research focuses on the politics of migration and transnationalism with particular emphasis on the mobility of low-income people from Indonesia. I examine the production and control of spatial mobility across scales, and specialize in the analysis of gender dynamics in global circuits of migration. My work develops connections between critical political-economy, migration studies, and feminist theory to understand how and why specific geographies of development, poverty, and inequality are forged. I use the tools of ethnography, social theory, and survey research to explore the cultural and economic politics of development, the gendering of labor migration, and the role of the state in shaping local and transnational spaces of low-income migrants’ work. My most recent work investigates transnational migration in relation to the emergence of Indonesian political Islam, and the anti-poverty, migrants’ rights movements that have arisen particularly in the large cities of Java over the last decade. The relational aspects of poverty most central to my research are those relationships linking employers with employee, specifically middle- and high-income employers and the low-income overseas domestic workers from Indonesia whom they employ. In addition, my work is informed by attention to the relational production of ethical research, critical reflexivity, and transnational feminist praxis in collaboration with migrant workers and activists.

Contact: silvey@geog.utoronto.ca