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
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
