Gender and Development Studies Field of Study, School of Environment, Resources and Development (SERD), will organize a seminar on “Debt, Mobility and Dependency in Southeast Asia: The Case of Cambodian Migrant Workers in Thailand” by Dr. Annuska Derks, on Thursday, 25 October 2007, 4:00 – 5:30 p.m., Room – E 220.
Dr. Annuska Derks obtained M.A. degrees in social anthropology and development studies and a Ph.D. in social sciences from the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She has carried out extensive field research in Cambodia, particularly on ethnic groups, gender, migration, trafficking and sex work. She has taught courses on social anthropology at the University of Berne, Switzerland, and on migration at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. She is currently a coordinator and researcher in a comparative research project on debt, mobility and dependency in Southeast Asia with the University of Berne and the Graduate Institute of Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland.
In her seminar, Dr Annuska Derks will talk about her recent project focusing on the inter-linkages between debt, mobility and dependency in Southeast Asia, and the ways in which current forms of labour mobility and immobility have transmuted out of older ones and adapted to processes related to the region’s integration in the global economy. Migration has become one of the major issues of the twenty-first century. We can see this clearly in Southeast Asia, where the mobility of men and women within as well as across national boundaries has taken new forms, directions and magnitudes due to the recent economic and political developments within the region. In the case of Thailand, a major sending and receiving country of migrant workers, is particularly interesting as we can observe how “outsiders” are recruited to do work for which “insiders” are difficult to find – such as the Cambodians, Laotians or Burmese who now perform the kinds of jobs in Thailand that Thai migrant workers do overseas. One of the methodological difficulties of the study of the social phenomena like labor mobility is to determine an encompassing level of analysis that goes beyond overly general descriptions based upon statistical regularities, and also beyond quick generalizations on the basis of anecdotal individual migrant stories. This means that both depth and a proper contextualization are necessary for a comprehensive understanding of the conditions, mechanisms and discourses that shape patterns of mobility as well as those leading to immobility. Within the framework of this project, Dr. Annuska Derks has conducted research among Cambodian migrant workers in Thailand. Her presentation will highlight some preliminary insights of this research.
