Searching for Work

Small-Scale Mobility and Unskilled Labor in Southeast Asia

Collection : SEATIDE-Silkworm books

Collection's number: 3

Editor: Vignato (Silvia), Alcano (Matteo Carlo)

Edition: Silkworm Books

Publication date: 2018

Status : Other Distributor

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ISBN-13 : 9786162151439

Width : 15 cm

Height : 23 cm

Weight : 0.41 kg

Number of pages : 312

Distributor : Autre éditeur

Geography : South East Asia

Language : English

Place : Chiang Mai

Support : Papier

Description :

15x23, 312 p., 2017, English, paperback

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Abstract

More and more, in Southeast Asia, low-skilled labor is expected to be mobile and job-seeking implies leaving. In factories, plantations, fields, extraction, commerce, services, and construction, a whole nebula of low-paid, mostly young, small-scale migrants allows the regional economy to function. This volume brings together a unique collection of bottom-up accounts of the work and life of locally mobile workers who are highly representative in their countries and throughout the region: contractual farmers in Laos, miners, young urban workers in services, construction workers in Indonesia, Filipino shoemakers, and Vietnamese factory workers. The chapters focus on these laborers’ gendered ideas of work and life at large but also on the ideology of work they have constructed. In addition to telling these stories, the contributors analyze how ill-defined mobile work leads to lives of structural and symbolic precariousness. In different ways, precarization is questioned as a specific gendered economic policy within neoliberal contexts. The workers’ reflexive considerations of their makeshift life projects lead to descriptions of embodied forms of resilience and creativity, however diverse. Through interdisciplinary approaches, heightened attention is paid to the interaction between localities, moral economies, and global neoliberal politics.
 
Contributors are Matteo Carlo Alcano, Vanina Bouté, Michela Cerimele, Concepcion Lagos, Pietro P. Masina, Giacomo Tabacco, and Silvia Vignato

Table of contents

Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Locally Mobile Workers in Southeast Asia: An Invisible, Gendered, and Precarious Nebula
Silvia Vignato
 
1. New Path of Work at the Lao-Chinese Border: From Self-Sufficient Agricultur to Wage Labor
Vanina Bouté
 
2. Within and Beyond the "Rainy Mountains": Mobility, Access to Work, and Mining in Gold-Rich West Aceh
Giacomo Tabacco
 
3. "What is the Solution, Miss?": Small-Scale Mobility, Work, and Unemployment for Young, Unskilled Laborers in Aceh
Silvia Vignato
 
4. A Site for Workers: Construction Sites and Mobility in Surabaya
Matteo Carlo Alcano
 
5. On Foot in the Age of Globalization: Sapatero in the Philippine Footwear Capital
Concepcion Lagos
 
6. Informalizing the Formal: Work and the Dual Dormitory Labor Regime in Hanoi's Thang Long Industrial Park
Michela Cerimele
 
7. An Uneven Development Trap in Southeast Asia and Its Implications for Labor
Pietro P. Masina
 
Contributors
Index of Subjects and Authors

Notes

Available on Silkworm books website here

About the collection

SEATIDE-Silkworm books

The SEATIDE-Silkworm Books series is a three-volume series written for the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), in the framework of the project “Integration in Southeast Asia: Trajectories of Inclusion, Dynamics of Exclusion” (SEATIDE) funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission (FP7). The research leading to these results as well as their publication have received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme [FP7/2007–2013] under Grant Agreement n°320221. 
 
SEATIDE partners:
-École française d’Extrême-Orient (France)
-University of Hamburg (Germany)
-University of Cambridge (UK)
-Tallinn University (Estonia)
-University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy)
-Universiti Sains Malaysia (Malaysia)
-Universitas Gadjah Mada (Indonesia)
-Chiang Mai University (Thailand)
-Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (Vietnam)

About the editor

Vignato (Silvia)

Silvia Vignato is associate professor in anthropology at Università di Milano-Bicocca. Her research interests are work and marginal environments in Indonesia (Aceh) and Malaysia. She is actively involved in EuroSEAS and is chief editor of Antropologia.

Alcano (Matteo Carlo)

MATTEO CARLO ALCANO is a postdoctoral fellow at Università di Milano-Bicocca

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