Continual arrival and the longue durée: Emplacement as activism among migrant workers in Hong Kong
| Autor: | Nicole Constable |
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| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Migration Studies. 10:235-252 |
| ISSN: | 2049-5846 2049-5838 |
| DOI: | 10.1093/migration/mnab034 |
| Popis: | Most studies of ‘emplacement’ focus on immigrants or refugees who seek permanent settlement. In contrast, this article examines the significance of emplacement for ‘temporary migrants’ who live under conditions of ongoing arrival, contingency, and temporariness and have no expectation of remaining permanently. For temporary migrant workers in Hong Kong, specifically domestic workers, I argue that emplacement has become a form of collective and ongoing activism. It does not rely on any one person’s or one group’s permanence but persists across the longue durée. This activism builds social ties and produces sociability to claim a collective presence that offers nurturance and is a form of rights-claiming. Both economically and socially marginal, foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong claim their central place, socially and geographically, and they collectively demand recognition and visibility. Within the context of temporary migrant workers’ ongoing arrival at the margins, this article examines ethnographic materials from three temporal strata (between 1990 and 2020) to illustrate how emplacement is produced and reproduced through conscious efforts and the production of sociality and sociability across time. More broadly, this article contributes to critical analyses of conceptual binaries of margin and center, permanent and temporary, migrant and citizen, and highlights the coevalness of temporary migrants and nonmigrants. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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