Care and Control in Asian Migrations

Abstract

This article takes the relationship between care and control as a starting point for ethnographically approaching the dynamics of Asian migrations. The pairing of care and control allows for a description of how migration takes shape through the historical development of entangled relationshipsranging from the supportive to the coerciverather than strictly through dyadic relationships, social networks, structural forces, or as an effect of push-pull factors. Asian migration is thus approached as a socio-political field that is shaped through emerging forms of care and control which is shaped and constrained, for instance, by the state, market, social relations, brokers, and fellow travellers.

‘Not as single spies’: a review of European Social Anthropology 2020

“…Further excavating relations in the developing global climate of precarity, a special issue of Ethnos focused on the symbiotic tension between the contemporary phenomenon of care and its penumbra, control, as they play into the dynamics of migration in Asia. Johnson and Lindquist (2020) set the scene, outlining the emergence of care as a major theme across the humanities and social sciences in recent times. They articulate the feminist focus on care as a gendered and situated form of labour and knowledge, and particularly indicate how modern conceptions of care have evolved through Foucault's notions of pastoral power and the care of the self, which in different ways highlight the links between power, knowledge and subjectivity as well as care and control.…”

Thinking Policy Through Migrant Domestic Workers’ Itineraries

“…Surely the awareness that a police raid could lead to their imprisonment and deportation contributed to the experience of precarity among migrants without papers. Indeed, the depth of their precarity with or without papers is simply underlined by these reports by some of feeling less fearful and less confined as undocumented workers than they had felt with papers in the confines of their employers’ homes in the United Arab Emirates (see also Johnson & Lindquist, 2019). 15…”

“… 2. For a discussion of the complex tensions between care and control—not just via policies and state actors but also by “market, social relations, brokers and fellow travellers”—in Asian migrations, see Johnson and Lindquist (2019, p. 195). …”

Communities of care: Public donations, development assistance, and independent philanthropy in the Wa State of Myanmar

“…If, traditionally, ‘care’ has been researched in relationship to kinship, anthropologists have recently pointed to the central importance of care for social organisation in general (Johnson and Lindquist, 2019; Thelen, 2015; Ticktin, 2011). In doing so, they are influenced by the work on care done by feminist philosophers, in particular, who have defined ‘care’ very broadly beyond domestic labour, 2 and have argued for its central importance to questions of political engagement (Held, 2005), both in an evaluative (that the work of care has been often overlooked) and in a normative sense (assumptions that care should motivate action).…”