As members of history's largest rural-urban migration, the migrants who make up a great portion of urban China's low-wage labor force and burgeoning population face unique challenges. Although the trajectories of their movements do not cross international boundaries, most are legally prevented from ever gaining full legal status in their destinations, based on the status they hold within China's hukou system of household registration. This system parallels national citizenship policies in important ways, providing an alternative to standard understandings of how the legal boundaries around communities are drawn. However, empirical work bringing the hukou system into relation with theoretical developments in (international) migration studies is scarce. Based on a series of qualitative interviews conducted in Shanghai and rural Anhui province, this article argues that the structure and effects of the hukou system demonstrate clearly that the boundaries of national territory cannot be considered as the exclusive site from which bordering processes emanate. Bridging the gap between scholarship of Chinese migration and international boundary-making, I position this argument as an extension of the recent trend in border studies to understand bordering processes as taking place beyond the territorial boundaries of the nation state.
As changing border enforcement policies reshape patterns of migrant traffic across the US-Mexico border, the rapid increase of migrant deaths along the border has led to the development of solidarity organizing that provides humanitarian aid and alters the physical environment of the most deadly migration corridor along the US-Mexico border. Through their presence in this space, volunteers working with the organization No More Deaths are drawn in by the power of the events that take place around them and that they themselves take part in. Based on 12 weeks of participatory research with No More Deaths, this article follows the trajectories of individual activists who have become enmeshed in a material context that demands their intervention. This description treats the border space as an autonomous site, imbued with seductive potential that allows it to disrupt or reconfigure individual conceptions of political agency. Resumen: Mientras que variaciones en las políticas de seguridad fronteriza de los EEUU han cambiado las rutas migratorias que atraviesan el desierto fronterizo entre México y Estados Unidos, el aumento rápido en el monto de muertes de migrantes ha tenido como resultado el desarrollo de organizaciones solidarios que proveen asistencia humanitaria y intentan alterar el mero ambiente físico del corredor migratorio más peligroso en el sur de Arizona. Por su presencia en éste espacio, trabajadores voluntarios de la organización No Más Muertes están atraídos por el poder de los eventos que ocurren alrededor de ellos, y de los cuales ellos mismos forman parte. Basado en doce semanas de investigación participativo con No Más Muertes, este artículo sigue las trayectorias de activistas individuales que se han integrados en un contexto material que exige su intervención. Este teorización reconoce al espacio fronterizo como sitio autónomo, impregnado con un poder seductor que lo permite interrumpir o alterar concepciones individuas de agencia política.
While a growing body of literature understands infrastructure through the social relations and labor that make it possible, the work of construction in infrastructure projects remains under-theorized. Drawing on participatory research with migrant construction workers in Shanghai, China, I consider the outcomes of a reliance on informal, migrant labor in Shanghai's multi-year “Overhead-Underground” infrastructure renovation project, which moves overhead fiber-optics cabling underground. Like other Chinese infrastructure projects, this reconstruction of Shanghai's fiber-optic network relies on large quantities of on-the-ground construction labor, drawn from a low-wage, precarious, and largely informal migrant workforce that is not expected not be incorporated into the city. Through engagement with scholarship that has viewed people and social relationships as infrastructure, I demonstrate the processes by which informal migrant construction labor facilitates both physical construction and the accumulation of infrastructural knowledge, both of which are necessary to the completion of infrastructural upgrading projects.
Although material components of digital infrastructure stacks are often understood as operating through platforms or protocols in a smoothly interconnected way, their expansion, repair, and continued functionality nevertheless require significant interventions in the material world. These include the installation, repair, and maintenance of fiber-optic backbones, as well as the disruption of everyday residential life for the purpose of “last mile” fiber installations. Based on participant observation conducted with construction teams engaged in rebuilding the base level of Shanghai’s digital infrastructure stack, this article questions “plug-and-play” views of Chinese digital infrastructure, instead refocusing analysis on the legal and sociocultural technologies that facilitate material infrastructural construction. In the case of Shanghai’s Overhead-Underground project, legal and social mechanisms that facilitate migration have themselves become crucial to the physical aspects of digital infrastructure, which is built through subcontracted low-waged labor systems that rely on assumedly temporary rural-to-urban migrant labor. The resulting systems of labor provision both reflect and maintain the structure of a politically divided public: High-quality “smart city” infrastructure is built for the service of an avowedly urban public, but only through a reliance on “low-skilled” rural migrant construction workers, who are formally and informally excluded from the city their infrastructural interventions are designed to serve.
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