Mahua Sarkar (Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto):
Talking with Men: Ethnographic Research Among Transnational Labour Migrants
Monday, 10 October 2022, 17:40-19:10 (CEST) : CEU Auditorium and via Zoom
Temporary transnational contract work and circular migration bring millions of workers from poorer parts of the world to more affluent economies every year in search of better economic and social opportunities. ‘Talking with Men’ draws on the author’s extended fieldwork among Bangladeshi male contract workers in Singapore and return migrants in Bangladesh to investigate some of the strategies through which young migrants – some barely out of their teens – negotiate the intense flux, uncertainty, and their multiple responsibilities, piecing together an interstitial life in host societies in the absence of normative diasporas. The lecture also reflects on some methodological questions that emerge in a dialogic context in which the researcher and her interlocutors are separated by class, gender, religious and national identifications, but share a common language, ethnicity, a fraught historical past, and – in Singapore – a migrant present inflected by differential access to social and economic privilege.
