Scholars who have applied transnational perspectives to studies of migration and remittances have called for a move beyond the developmentalist approach to accommodate an expanded understanding of the social meanings of remittances. Researchers working in Asia have begun to view the remittances of money, gifts and services that labour migrants send to their families as transnational 'acts of recognition', as an enactment of gendered roles and identities, and as a component of the social practices that create the ties that bind migrants to their 'home' countries. In this article, we depart from the more common focus on remittance behaviour among labour migrants and turn instead to examine how, as marriage migrants, Vietnamese women generate and confer meaning on the remittances they send. First, from the women's viewpoint, we discuss the extent to which expectations vested in being able to generate remittances for the natal family by marrying a Singaporean man not only translate into motivation for marriage migration but also shape the parameters of the marriage. Second, we show how sending remittances are significant to the women as 'acts of recognition' in the construction of gendered identities as filial daughters, and, through the 'connecting' and 'disconnecting' power of remittances, in the reimagining of the transnational family. Third, we discuss the strategies that women devise in negotiating between the conflicting demands and expectations of their natal and marital families and in securing their 'place' between two families. We base our findings on an analysis of interviews and ethnographic work with Vietnamese women and their Singaporean husbands through commercial matchmaking agencies.
Young people in the Asia-Pacific increasingly move around for work, education and leisure, and combinations thereof. Asians make up 41 per cent of international migrants worldwide (United Nations 2017) and the region represents diverse flows of both inbound and outbound, short-and long-term migrations. Settler nations with aging populations, like Australia and New Zealand, strategically seek to draw on the mobility aspirations of burgeoning youth populations elsewhere in the region as a migrant labour force but also as consumers of education and tourism experiences. Emerging economic powers like China and India seek to send vast cohorts of young people abroad to obtain skills, and simultaneously attract diaspora returnees and highly skilled foreigners back to work and invest. The increasing reach of multinational corporations across the region creates new opportunities for the circular mobilities of professionals, tracing new patterns of movement alongside traditional migration routes for manual labourers and domestic workers. Intra-regional mobility is increasingly important for youth. For example, while more than half of all tertiary international students globally are from Asia (UNESCO 2013), East Asia and the Pacific are an increasingly significant destination region, hosting 19 per cent of all international enrolments (UNESCO 2016). Further, new virtual mobilities, such as cross-border education programmes and digital outsourcing, position immobile young students and workersas well as those who prefer to 'stay' rather than 'move'into transnational and transregional networks and processes even as they remain in place. Despite the embedding of cultures of mobility into the lives of many mobile and immobile youth in the Asia-Pacific, contemporary youth mobilities research has been strongly focused on the European Union (EU) (see for example,
Drawing on fieldwork carried out between 2013 and 2014 in Singapore, I offer a case study of how students are shaped by and pushing back against neoliberal discourses, by focusing on the ethnographic context of a local private education institute. Drawing on theorizations around the corporeal politics of value, this article examines the actual production of neoliberal subjectivities in light of a new rhetoric around the 'learning citizen' in the globalising city-state. I demonstrate how private degree students engaged with practices of value coding that attempt to fashion themselves into 'employable' future workers, but in ways that are informed by a different circulation of value meanings. These value practices -often defensive, anti-elitist, and subversive of a dominant subject of value (i.e. the 'proper' university student) -were aimed at recuperating and creating a separate domain of value worth. I argue that the actual production of neoliberal citizenship in education spaces need to be (re-)interpreted through a politics of value coding. This allows for a clearer view of how students themselves negotiate embodied forms of value, with and against those practices of alienation and exclusion that mark them as human capital.
This paper analyses the cultural production of the 'educated person' through student migrants' engagement with ideas and practices of time. In particular, it pays attention to how these young people negotiate identities and develop unique strategies to achieve personal goals of education. Drawing on the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Flaherty, I conceptualise time as both a discursive structure and cultural resource to forward two interrelated arguments. First, I argue that time is an important discourse in the ways that ideas about education and becoming educated are imagined, performed and negotiated. Second, I suggest more attention needs to be placed on time as a central facet of cultural (re)production. This study focuses on one particular student flow from Southeast Asia to Singapore as a case to illuminate the role of time in cultural production, based on research with thirty students conducted between 2010 and 2011 primarily through biographical interviews.
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Singapore between 2013 and 2014, this article discusses the ways in which students mobilise different moral and ethical values to perform informal care at a private educational institute. The task is to advance a critical analysis of how students can "act differently" from the dominant strategic and calculative image of a neoliberal actor as portrayed in broader literature. Specifically, I suggest more attention needs to be given to love and care as the basis for radical practices in everyday life. I discuss the themes of deconstructive empathy, friendship solidarities, and intergenerational love to demonstrate how caring practices can produce more-than-capitalist subjectivities in the neoliberalising spaces of higher education. The article adds theoretical and empirical flesh to ongoing efforts in exploring "alternative" experiences of neoliberalising education through care, love, and intimacy.
As international marriages continue to be on the rise around the world, and in East and Southeast Asia in particular, there is an increasing need for more focused studies on the phenomenon. While the extant literature has paid attention to the complex dynamics of marital intimacies through a 'gender-sensitive' lens, the experiences of men are still largely under-examined. This article considers the gendered and classed subjectivities of Singaporean husbands who have married Vietnamese wives and focuses on 'money' as a key vehicle through which the men are able to construct masculinities in the spaces of transnational marriage and family. We argue that these non-migrant men engage with transnational processes and practices strategically in order to reclaim respectable and honourable masculine status. In doing so, they dislodge themselves from the idiom of 'failed masculinity' commonly ascribed to men who seek foreign spouses, but at the same time reproduce dominant models of masculinity predicated on 'breadwinning' and 'providing'. This article draws on the narratives of 20 Singaporean Chinese men from a range of social backgrounds to demonstrate the endurance of money and economic potency in the performance of masculinities.
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